I would expect generational patterns to occur anywhere that one finds a dynamic of history, whether imposed from outside or developed internally.

Howe and Strauss may not show their primary focus upon Fourth turnings in countries other than the United States; their focus is Americocentric because that is where the bulk of their research comes from. One can impute that the cycle must operate in roughly the same manner in some other countries. But it is easy to look at the period 1933-1945 in some countries and think that no other explanation exists than a 4T. How else can one explain the Blitz in London, the expanisonistic rise and collapse of Mussolini's Italy, the horrors that Hitler imposed upon countries such as Poland, Yugoslavia, and Russia and the catastrophe that the Allies brought all the way to the German heartland, the Holocaust, and war of similar ferocity in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific at precisely the same time?

The World War II Crisis ended earlier in Spain (Spanish Civil War, with Franco's consolidation of power, but perhaps as late as 1944, when the danger of invasion from either the Allies or Nazi Germany abated) and later in some participants. I interpret -- notice the first person -- events in eastern Europe, with forced population exchanges and the consolidation of Commie power or its attempt bringing the end of the World War II Crisis in eastern Europe (Finland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Greece) as late as 1948. The Berlin Airlift and the formal division of Germany suggest an end to the Crisis in 1948 -- even if the Crisis ended earlier in Britain, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and Denmark with the end of hostilities. China? The Crisis ended in 1950 with the Commie conquest of some peripheral areas (Hainan and Chinese Turkestan). Russia? 1945. Israel? The War for Independence ending only in 1948 ended the most horrific and transformative 4T that any people ever knew, in view of the Holocaust that preceded it.

India? British India was in part a war zone during World War II. Burma was then a part of British India, and ferocious battles between Japan and Britain poured over the internal boundary between Bengal and Burma. Bengal had a lethal famine due to the cut-off of Burmese rice that had long fed Bengal. The Partition of India is beyond question a 4T event because it was bloody and led to population exchanges -- desires of the great Gandhi notwithstanding.

I draw the line between a 4T and a 1T, as I believe that Howe and Strauss do, with the consolidation of a new postwar order. If nothing changes in the wake of the war to the political order, then they consolidation freezes the cultural and political norms for the next two decades.

Barring either a crushing tradition (such as distinctions of social class) or to pervasive brainwashing, people are likely to fit cultural and psychological patterns en masse almost everywhere. People everywhere seem to chafe at distinctions of social class if they are the oppressed (the Class Struggle of Karl Marx, one of the few things that he got right)... and not even China seems capable of brainwashing people. I've met some Chinese from the PRC... and I see no monolith. North Korea? Maybe. But North Korea is a freak of the world.

(from John Xenakis)
When I joined this forum in 2003, I said that the Eastern European
timeline was different from the Western European timeline, and I was
ridiculed for it.

I disagree with you on that one; I think that eastern Europe is on mostly (the former Yugoslavia may be an exception) the same timeline as most of western Europe. World War II and the struggles between bourgeois politics and Communism put the whole of eastern Europe within three years of the timeline for Britain. Yugoslavia got its 4T early thanks to rabid nationalism that split the country violently. As I see it, ethnic splits within Yugoslavia that exploded in World War II revived only fifty years later because of the failure of Tito and his successors to resolve them.

The Caucasus region of the former USSR (Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh) is indisputably 4T. Sudan? The veritable definition as a full-blown genocidal war. But even these seem close to the expected sixty years between the end of one Crisis and the beginning of the next. Chechnya was one of the farthest points of Nazi conquest, and Sudan was in part a battleground of the Second World War -- between Britain and Fascist Italy.

(from John Xenakis)
When I joined this forum in 2003, I said that if TFT was going to be
of any use at all, then it had to apply to all countries at all times
in history, and I was ridiculed for it.

I came here later. I agree with you that TFT should be applicable to other countries to the extent that data is available. But Howe and Strauss have focused attention largely on the US, which has a copious amount of accessible history, has a great volume of mass and high culture, and has not had successful eras of repression that suppress expression of anything other than officially-sanctioned material. The US fits very well; a country like Holland has a small volume of literature and mass culture (I know of only one literary work originally written in Dutch in the last two hundred years known outside of the Netherlands, and that work was written by a fifteen-year-old in a hidden attic); in Russia one must look through the veil of despotism of tsars and commissars even if Russia has a rich high culture. China? Japan? Thailand? Korea? Indonesia? Turkey? One has the complication of a language very different from English.

T4T theories should work reasonably well for Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. Maybe the Indian subcontinent. Russia? Not so well -- despotism and totalitarianism that crushed much political and cultural life. But even Russia has waves of intense and abated despotism.

(from John Xenakis)
Most of the concepts you're now talking about are not in TFT. Many
of them were developed by me personally, and then ridiculed, or they
were developed by other people in this forum who caught on to the
Generational Dynamics theories and built on top of them, or who
developed similar theories in parallel.

Of course! I am not a T4T purist; I have read other history and theory of history -- including yours. I am at times discussing things not in the books, which should be no surprise. Not all information comes from a printed book. A few of my ideas are my own (as in Crises -- waves of crisis and respites that might describe a Toynbee-like Time of Troubles [Russia, 1917-1945] of unusual severity and duration, in contrast to the comparatively short but deadly American Civil War, which I see having only one wave). I can explain the composition of a Crisis and at times why a Crisis turns out why it does, but I can't explain except in personalities and externalities (wars from outside, resource depletion) why a Crisis Era would have three or one wave.

Some of us seek to relate T4T or Generational Dynamics to other phenomena -- economics, politics, crime, technology, culture... T4T makes sense of a lot. So does Generational dynamics (with the qualification that genocidal warfare no longer seems a certainty in a 4T in prosperous countries. Population pressure upon the land is no longer a cause for economic distress that spurs expansionist wars as was true seventy years ago. Who now speaks of Lebensraum as a national solution anywhere in the First World or the former Soviet Union?

But some theories exist that seem to contradict the contention that genocidal wars, international and civil, are inevitable: I look at E. J. Rummel's theory of Democratic Peace. Democracies do not wage war against each other; tyrannies are warmongers that see their own people, let alone foreigners, as expendable for the public good as seen through the lens of the tyrant. It's easier, of course, to initiate wars with a young population characteristic of much of the Third World -- but not with an aging population. Armies rely upon cheap labor to wage war -- not upon 45-year-old skilled and professional labor other than career military men.

Rummel contends that democracies are not as inscrutable as non-democratic societies as all kinds. Democracies, because of Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, tolerate peace movements that some non-democratic systems would consider treasonable. Leaders in democracies must heed the popular will as well as reality, for in a democracy, popular will is relevant as it isn't in a tyranny or dictatorship. Tyrants and dictators start wars because they can. The same sorts who can send someone to the gallows for some affront can get away with a decision to start a war of aggression.


In any event, Rummel's theory of the Democratic Peace might explain why one should not reasonably expect a war between a democratic America, a democratic Japan, or a democratic India despite huge differences of culture and economic practice. America had a particularly nasty war with Japan in the last 4T -- but the Japanese government of the time was a gangster-run dictatorship. Democracy has gained greatly in this cycle, and far fewer tyrants strut upon the scene.

In any event I think that Rummel's theory of a Democratic Peace deserves a thread of its own.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

...

Thanks for your comment. I'm pretty discouraged right now, so I'm going
to pass on responding for the time being.

John

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

Howe and Strauss may not show their primary focus upon Fourth turnings in countries other than the United States; their focus is Americocentric because that is where the bulk of their research comes from. One can impute that the cycle must operate in roughly the same manner in some other countries. But it is easy to look at the period 1933-1945 in some countries and think that no other explanation exists than a 4T. How else can one explain the Blitz in London, the expanisonistic rise and collapse of Mussolini's Italy, the horrors that Hitler imposed upon countries such as Poland, Yugoslavia, and Russia and the catastrophe that the Allies brought all the way to the German heartland, the Holocaust, and war of similar ferocity in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific at precisely the same time?

The World War II Crisis ended earlier in Spain (Spanish Civil War, with Franco's consolidation of power, but perhaps as late as 1944, when the danger of invasion from either the Allies or Nazi Germany abated) and later in some participants. I interpret -- notice the first person -- events in eastern Europe, with forced population exchanges and the consolidation of Commie power or its attempt bringing the end of the World War II Crisis in eastern Europe (Finland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Greece) as late as 1948. The Berlin Airlift and the formal division of Germany suggest an end to the Crisis in 1948 -- even if the Crisis ended earlier in Britain, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and Denmark with the end of hostilities. China? The Crisis ended in 1950 with the Commie conquest of some peripheral areas (Hainan and Chinese Turkestan). Russia? 1945. Israel? The War for Independence ending only in 1948 ended the most horrific and transformative 4T that any people ever knew, in view of the Holocaust that preceded it.

India? British India was in part a war zone during World War II. Burma was then a part of British India, and ferocious battles between Japan and Britain poured over the internal boundary between Bengal and Burma. Bengal had a lethal famine due to the cut-off of Burmese rice that had long fed Bengal. The Partition of India is beyond question a 4T event because it was bloody and led to population exchanges -- desires of the great Gandhi notwithstanding.

I draw the line between a 4T and a 1T, as I believe that Howe and Strauss do, with the consolidation of a new postwar order. If nothing changes in the wake of the war to the political order, then they consolidation freezes the cultural and political norms for the next two decades.

The postwar order sometimes isn't consolidated until well after the climax, and major institutional changes can happen late in the first turning. In my experience, the recovery era ends around 18 years after the climax, not when the countries' political boundaries are set. An awakening occurs when the Prophet generation (and some Artist cuspers) reaches young adulthood. Following the climax, there is typically a sharp drop in action and a dramatic rise in the value of human life. I believe that during this period, even if chaos remains, the cultural mood allows Prophets to develop.

I've written about this before here:

http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/s...d.php?p=220639

http://fourthturning.com/forum/showthread.php?p=219436

I came here later. I agree with you that TFT should be applicable to other countries to the extent that data is available. But Howe and Strauss have focused attention largely on the US, which has a copious amount of accessible history, has a great volume of mass and high culture, and has not had successful eras of repression that suppress expression of anything other than officially-sanctioned material. The US fits very well; a country like Holland has a small volume of literature and mass culture (I know of only one literary work originally written in Dutch in the last two hundred years known outside of the Netherlands, and that work was written by a fifteen-year-old in a hidden attic); in Russia one must look through the veil of despotism of tsars and commissars even if Russia has a rich high culture. China? Japan? Thailand? Korea? Indonesia? Turkey? One has the complication of a language very different from English.

T4T theories should work reasonably well for Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. Maybe the Indian subcontinent. Russia? Not so well -- despotism and totalitarianism that crushed much political and cultural life. But even Russia has waves of intense and abated despotism.

There are soo many factors that go in to the making of a generation. An oppressive regime can only do so much.

Originally Posted by MichaelEaston

The postwar order sometimes isn't consolidated until well after the climax, and major institutional changes can happen late in the first turning. In my experience, the recovery era ends around 18 years after the climax, not when the countries' political boundaries are set. An awakening occurs when the Prophet generation (and some Artist cuspers) reaches young adulthood. Following the climax, there is typically a sharp drop in action and a dramatic rise in the value of human life. I believe that during this period, even if chaos remains, the cultural mood allows Prophets to develop.

Political boundaries are the least of the issue. For all practical purposes, the eastern boundary of Germany was established in 1945 when the Soviet military authorized the Polish postwar government to expel German populations east of the Oder-Neisse line. Germany remained in political flux as the Soviet authorities of occupation transformed "their" sector into the German Democratic Republic (with the steady obliteration or neutering of any opposition they temporarily permitted by treaty) and the attempt to cut off western Berlin from access to the West. The formality of establishing the separate German government corresponds with the end of any meaningful chance for any Communists to have meaningful power in the West or non-Communists to have meaningful power in the East. After that (1949), both systems stabilized.

There are so many factors that go in to the making of a generation. An oppressive regime can only do so much.

Of course! It can discriminate harshly, granting special privileges to those who show deference to the political leadership and imposing deprivations upon those who don't go along. An oppressive government certainly controls local media and the curriculum of schools, and may require students to take coursework in dubious studies best described as glorification of the existing leadership. It can ban books and repress certain expressions in art.

Does anyone question that the Apartheid regime of South Africa was able to enforce differences between whites and non-whites not only in economics but also in access to education and information?

...Without question, the end of a Crisis forces a sort of social peace that ordinarily comes at a price -- often rigid conformity. After a Crisis, personalities seen as culpable in the decay leading to the Crisis and those seen culpable in debacles of a Crisis, let alone outright traitors, are vilified. Persons taking unorthodox stances are often compared to the villains of the 3T and 4T. Not until people (Idealists who were infants without memory of the Crisis or born after the Crisis) reach adulthood without memory of the Crisis does such vilification cease in its effectiveness.

Dear Matt,

Originally Posted by MichaelEaston

> I edited my post for grammar. You might want to put the new one
> up.

I updated the web site page.

Incidentally, I like your innovative use of the term
"Post-Unraveling," to indicate the initial portion of the Crisis era,
prior to the regeneracy.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Incidentally, I like your innovative use of the term
"Post-Unraveling," to indicate the initial portion of the Crisis era,
prior to the regeneracy.

Me too. There aren't really many distinctive characteristics of the era. Sometimes the country seems to be teetering on the edge. Other times, the country seems just like a dead wasteland, at peace but lacking any innovative spirit whatsoever.

In many ways, it's the Unraveling taken to the extreme. Prophets are busy quibbling over small things, Nomads are raising families, Heroes are concerned with their future, and Artists are just docile children. At least Nomad-led "nothingness culture" has overtones in the Unraveling. Heroes, slightly out of place in this Post-Unraveling anomaly, lack even that.

Dear Mike,

Originally Posted by Mikebert

> And I took your criticisms to heart and redid my analysis, much
> more carefully. And I learned that with better control over the
> data (designed to remove unsconsicous cherry-picking on my part)
> all the correlations became statistically insignifcant. I reported
> this conclusion on your thread on 30 May 2007.
> http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/s...postcount=2310

> So I dropped the project because the method I chose doesn't work,
> and I was honest enough to admit that it doesn't. There are no
> statistically significant correlations between the saeculum and
> any other cycle that I could find. That is, unlike the findings I
> had earlier published, there is no valid empirical support for the
> existence of the saeculum . The same goes for the Kondratieff
> cycle, war cycles, political cycles or any of the other cycles I
> have studied with the sole exception of the Stock Cycle, the very
> first one I published on. And predictions based on that cycle (and
> none of the others) are the only ones that have actually come
> true.

> My view now is the saeculum isn't real because after years of
> trying to obtain objective, statistically valid evidence that it
> exists, I found none.

> There are correlations that look intriguing when viewed on the
> surface, but none of them stand up to rigorous tests.

I want to make some additional comments on this.

I'm totally baffled why you don't accept the validity of Generational
Dynamics. I believe that I HAVE proven its validity -- maybe not in
the statistical sense of counting events, but in other ways, and maybe
not in a mathematical sense, but in a "legal" sense, beyond a
reasonable doubt.

Have you seen my list of predictions?

** List of major Generational Dynamics predictions
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?d=ww2010.i.predictions

I said that the UN could not stop the Darfur civil war, and the UN has
not stopped the Darfur civil war. I said that any incipient Iraq
civil war would fizzle quickly, and the Sunni/Shia violence fizzled
after a few months. I said that the Kenya violence would not spiral
out of control, and the Kenya violence did not spiral out of control.

I claim that there's no way I could have gotten that long list of
predictions right if the underlying theory were wrong. The
probability of my being lucky every time would be infinitesimal.

I also summarized some additional "proofs" at the end of my new
article on the basics.

** Basics of Generational Dynamics
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?d=ww2010.i.basics080622

What I don't understand is why you don't accept the validity of these
proofs. Just because the statistical proofs didn't work out, why
does that mean you're not willing to consider other kinds of proofs?

I've asked you several times to work with me on some of these things.
For example, I think we could jointly author a book on "Stock Cycles
with Generational Dynamics" that would be sensational, and could even
be a best seller. Why won't you consider something like that?

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

I claim that there's no way I could have gotten that long list of
predictions right if the underlying theory were wrong. The
probability of my being lucky every time would be infinitesimal.

What about the war between Japan and China that was imminent? What about the stock market crash that was due to happen "within a couple year" almost half a dozen years ago? What about the bird flu you said you expected to kill zillions of people a couple of years ago? God knows what else.

Whatever.

Originally Posted by Zarathustra

What about the war between Japan and China that was imminent? What about the stock market crash that was due to happen "within a couple year" almost half a dozen years ago? What about the bird flu you said you expected to kill zillions of people a couple of years ago? God knows what else.

Whatever.

Much of history is random events and random juxtapositions of personalities. Generational theory might predict the potential explosiveness of a time, but it does not dictate the manner of explosion. Few could have predicted in 1928 that Germany would end up with leadership that would commit atrocities that "modern" people were "above". Religious bigotry was of course something for primitive people. Someone who read the first chapters of Mein Kampf and quit reading it out of contempt for its literary incompetence and philosophical absurdity at the time would have likely believed that its author either didn't mean what he said, would have to moderate himself to adjust to the realities, or was too cranky to ever rule anything. The Germans, after all, had far better than that to offer even in the worst of times.

Whatever X says, I believe that most of the world is still in some shock and shame from Axis and, increasingly, Stalinist atrocities. We have film clips of the liberation of the camps, complete with emaciated corpses that had to be bulldozed into mass graves... and those appear in public schools throughout the West. We have film clips of the trials of the (regrettably unsuccessful) conspirators of July 20 and see in those the horrific consequences of a system that sees fanaticism as a virtue and any independent thought based on old standards of decency as evil, and of course the consequences of uprisings in Warsaw... twice. Some of us get historical nightmares from seeing those even if we never experienced those times or if we are unlike the victims. Such is intended. I may be born in 1955, and I am not Jewish, but I never want to see a Hitler arise anywhere; I never want to see people treated as expendable anywhere; I want to see human conduct as antithetical to such horrors as possible.

I look at another horror contemporary to Hitlerism -- Stalinism -- and I see in it much the same callow disregard for human life. To be sure, the Stalinist order was even more secretive, and that order ended with more of a whimper than a bang. No foreign forces ever liberated the Gulags that more slowly extinguished the lives of clerics, businessmen, and independent peasants who had no desire to become serfs of a "socialist" State. It's easy to understand why successors of Stalin, some of them having culpability in its horrors, would underplay the dangers of tyranny and absolute power and fail to expose the full horror. But since the fall of the Soviet Union the exposures get increasingly unflattering in Russia itself. The reality that Solzhenitsyn reconstructs reliably becomes increasingly the official story even as Russia becomes a dictatorial order anew.

Can I predict the return of the horrors of Nazism or Stalinism anew where those are best known? I can only respond "not likely". Historical cycles may suggest Crisis-like times, but no certainty of the Crises blowing up as genocidal wars. Hitler is dead, and so is Stalin, and both are completely repudiated.

As a Boomer I can read Howe and Strauss and find parallels between my generation and the elder generation of the time of Stalin's purges and the Holocaust -- and I can only recognize a similar response to old film clips of Nazi atrocities that Missionaries would have found new. I can have read Dante's Inferno and see in it no horror that quite matches the Holocaust or Stalin's butchery and no appropriate punishment for its perpetrators. I can only imagine a new bolgia dedicated to the most egregious sinners of all times -- Nazis and Stalinists. I can't imagine what goes on there; I'm not Dante Aligheri, and I can't imagine any prose, let alone poetry, that could evoke any pity for such monsters.

What has humanity learned?

1. That gutter racism and religious prejudice are objects of abomination. Americans turned against segregationism when the segregationists started showing the need for violence to preserve a way of life that depended upon the debasement of blacks. The rest of the world is getting touchy about racism.

2. That mass killing of any kind is abominable. Idi Amin? Of course. Saddam Hussein? I'm sure that many Americans would have loved to have seen him haled before some foreign legal system after he gassed the Kurds.

3. That politicized, private militias are menaces to freedom. Fascii di Combattimento. Schutzstaffeln. Sturmabteilungen. Iron Guard. Arrow Cross. Ku Klux Klan. Enough said.

Should such now-apolitical street thugs as the Bloods and Crips go political, then they will be put down fast.

4. The necessity of Constitutional forms.

Originally Posted by Zarathustra

> What about the war between Japan and China that was imminent? What
> about the stock market crash that was due to happen "within a
> couple year" almost half a dozen years ago? What about the bird
> flu you said you expected to kill zillions of people a couple of
> years ago? God knows what else.

I'll answer your question, but if you dislike the answer, please
don't harass me, impugn my integrity, or ask me the same question
over and over. Just agree to disagree and leave it at that. OK?

You don't give actual quotes and URLs to support your claims about
what I said, but I think if you do look them up, you'll find that
anywhere I gave a time frame, it was always accompanied by a word
like "probably."

I frequently say on my web site that "Generational Dynamics tells you
what your final destination is, but doesn't tell you how you'll get
there or how long it will take." The things that I identify as
"Generational Dynamics predictions" have near 100% certainty based on
long-term generational trends, and I identify "probabilistic
predictions" as dependent on chaotic (in the sense of Chaos Theory)
events that can't be predicted.

I've developed a collection of techniques for making probabilistic
predictions. I have a big advantage over "pundits" and "analysts"
because I know what the final destination is, but there are still
uncertainties. Some of the techniques are based conceptually on
"Pólya's Urn," that I described a couple of years ago.

Pólya's Urn and Kismet
http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/showpost.php?p=183365&postcount=1535

Making a probabilistic prediction using a "Pólya's Urn" technique
requires an analysis of news events over a period of years, and
mentally estimating the number of red balls and green balls. This
technique has worked pretty well for me.

As for specifying time frames, it's always been a problem to decide
on effective wording. I experimented with different types of
wording, and usually settle on something like, "The exact time can't
be predicted. It might happen next week, next month, next year or
thereafter, but it will happen sooner rather than later."

As for bird flu, that's not even a generational issue. The
predictions are based on warnings from the World Health Organizations
(WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

Incidentally, for anyone else reading this: Don't assume that because
a bird flu pandemic hasn't happened doesn't meant it won't happen. In
HP (highly pathenogenic) H5N1, mutations have occurred in the last
three years that allow for easier human to human (H2H) transmission,
and a number of H2H clusters have been identified in Indonesia. The
final mutation might occur at any time.

According to WHO, we're overdue for a major flu pandemic. The exact
timing can't be predicted. It might happen next week, next month,
next year or thereafter, but it's coming with certainty.

OK?

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

I'll answer your question, but if you dislike the answer, please don't harass me, impugn my integrity, or ask me the same question over and over. Just agree to disagree and leave it at that. OK?

If you actually answer the question, quite OK. That is all I have ever asked.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

You don't give actual quotes and URLs to support your claims about
what I said, but I think if you do look them up, you'll find that
anywhere I gave a time frame, it was always accompanied by a word
like "probably."

I frequently say on my web site that "Generational Dynamics tells you
what your final destination is, but doesn't tell you how you'll get
there or how long it will take." The things that I identify as
"Generational Dynamics predictions" have near 100% certainty based on
long-term generational trends, and I identify "probabilistic
predictions" as dependent on chaotic (in the sense of Chaos Theory)
events that can't be predicted.

And this is part of the problem I have been stating for years. I could, using "Love Dynamics" (now that sounds marketable!), make a list of a few dozen "predictions" but qualify most of them with "probably", "likely", and so on, and say they will happen "soon", "in a couple of years", call them "imminent" (whatever that entails), etc. If most of them do not come true, then I can say I never actually predicted them because I said "probably" or some such. If I still want to mention them I can just redefine "soon" and carry on.

But if they do happen, I can say I predicted them with 100% certainty! It's a no-lose situation for me.

Add to this I can say obvious things like, "There is going to be a fundamentally new strain of flu and a pandemic will result". Uh, of course. I can say that a large space rock (or iceball) is going to hit the Earth, and say that I know this with 100% certainty and that it will happen "soon". Since sizable chunks, like the one in Siberia 100 years ago, do come more often than people think, I actually am 100% certain. The beauty is, if it doesn't happen in the following 10 years I can qualify "soon" in "geologic terms" or some other modifier. But if it happens the following year, I am a GENIUS and Love Dynamics is the best thing since sliced bread. I predicted the giant meteor!!!!!

Do you see the problem I am trying to convey???

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

I've developed a collection of techniques for making probabilistic
predictions. I have a big advantage over "pundits" and "analysts"
because I know what the final destination is, but there are still
uncertainties. Some of the techniques are based conceptually on
"Pólya's Urn," that I described a couple of years ago.

Pólya's Urn and Kismet
http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/showpost.php?p=183365&postcount=1535

Making a probabilistic prediction using a "Pólya's Urn" technique
requires an analysis of news events over a period of years, and
mentally estimating the number of red balls and green balls. This
technique has worked pretty well for me.

I will look into this and get back to you. Thank you for your effort.

One the main reason GD flounders is the concept of a peaceloving hero generation at heart and warlike prophets at heart. The problem is that it does not match actual history, the sixties movements opposed vietnam preaching pacifism as well as avoiding the possibility of a WW3 with the USSR. If for example Deng Xiaoping did not have to deal with the militaries of the US and USSR near his borders, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have sent his hordes across asia to reestablish the chinese empire. If Khruschev did not back down in 1962, no doubt kennedy would have followed his commitments and implemented the war contingincy plans which called for the nuclear carpet bombing of the USSR. I have no doubt that Ahmadinejad hopes to one day send his armies across the middle east to reestablish a muslim caliphate under Iranian leadership as well as to destroy Israel.