He's a "street magician" or "performance artist" take your pick. He pulls these stunts. One was hanging in a box in London for 44 days, no food. Another was standing on a pole 100 feet in the air for 36 hours. Another involved lifting a cop car's front wheels off the ground. Just crazy wierd stuff.
Immigration and Fourth Turning
Hey all you "this is 3T" guys -- now that immigration is becoming a
major issue, have your criteria finally been met for you to agree that we're now
in a Fourth Turning?
John
One issue doth not make a 4t.
The country is starting to sound a little 4t on immigration that is true.
i've also been thinking that how the Flight 93 movie is received could be interesting too.
However, it seems to have opened quietly.
Re: Immigration and Fourth Turning
When Mandarin is propsed as a second language we'll be 4T. Chicago, Minnesota and the UK are proposing to add it to the school courses of the youngest Millennials. I wonder what Francis Scott Key's stirring words sound like in Celestial falsetto and a pipa played; will we have "outrage" enough to pass xenophobic, racist legislation in the Congress? Will the S.W.O.T.E. put the Presidential chop to such a bill?Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis
Thanks to a cousin who visited the Middle Kingdom, I already have my seal Celestial. You might consider ordering before the rush when we all kow-tow!
Six more years of 3T, Mr. Xenakis, I weirdly venture.
IMHO, we won't really be 4T until we begin to put aside our bickering and really work for the common good, and I don't see much of that happening as yet. I will go on record and say that we won't be fully 4T until late in 2011, so we have about 5 1/2 years before it can be determined if I can start my own psychic line.
I watched him last night. I think I needed some of that 3T freak show kind of entertainment to counter all the 4T gloom and doom.
Re: Immigration and Fourth Turning
There's a public school here in Portland that does Mandarin-immersion from K on up. It's wait-listed for miles and miles.
Re: Immigration and Fourth Turning
There's a public school here in Portland that does Mandarin-immersion from K on up. It's wait-listed for miles and miles.
That's a very good point.
Go into news.google.com and search on mandarin and school :
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ne...nG=Search+News
and you'll see many stories about Mandarin programs in schools.
So, Mr. Saari, what are your criteria now?
Sincerely,
John
Re: Immigration and Fourth Turning
Yeah, I think it now starts with pre-K (four-year-olds). PPS keeps getting calls from parents all over the country wondering what neighborhood they need to move to to be guaranteed a slot in the program. Apparently, if you can prove fluency by 12th grade, you get paid tuition through college as part of the program.There's a public school here in Portland that does Mandarin-immersion from K on up. It's wait-listed for miles and miles.
I'm pretty sure San Francisco public schools has had Mandarin immersion for years.
Oh man, Mandarin immersion is now the lingua franca as opposed to what used to be Spanish?
I feel like I may be one of those left behind in the future. Currently I will be taking Mandarin next semester as required for my degree, but the stigma to be fluent in it is doubly strong in my case, both as a way to be viable in the international community, and as a way to connect with my "heritage".
However, there is something deep in my core that vehemently refuses to learn it, or any other foreign language for that matter.
Right-Wing liberal, slow progressive, and other contradictions straddling both the past and future, but out of touch with the present . . .
"We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know." - Donald Rumsfeld
Nah, Portland Public also started new Spanish immersion pre-Ks and kindergartens at 3-4 schools, which will all add a year each year through 8th grade. This was on top of the 3-4 preexisting Spanish immersion programs. They also doubled the number of kindergarteners for the Japanese immersion program and added a pre-K to that program. Foreign language immersion is all the rage, with the world being flat and all.
Andy, I hear ya. I don't speak Hindi either, having rebelled as a kid. I have a white friend who is fluent in both Cantonese and Mandarin. He is married to a Chinese-American woman who speaks Mandarin (from school) and a smattering of Taiwanese (from home). Her sister is married to a Chinese-American guy who speaks only English, and boy does he get crap from his in-laws and parents, especially when compared to my friend.
I wonder where my high school foreign language of choice shakes out nowadays?
That would be French... or is it nowadays called Freedomese???
"Better hurry. There's a storm coming. His storm!!!" :-O -Abigail Freemantle, "The Stand" by Stephen King
Re: Immigration and Fourth Turning
I meant Celestial speak as an official language in Our Commercial Republic. We could be a bigger Belgium. :arrow: :arrow: :arrow: Not just a school course, but something the POTUS would stumble through at the SOTU! He who pays the pipa can call the tune.There's a public school here in Portland that does Mandarin-immersion from K on up. It's wait-listed for miles and miles.
That's a very good point.
Go into news.google.com and search on mandarin and school :
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ne...nG=Search+News
and you'll see many stories about Mandarin programs in schools.
So, Mr. Saari, what are your criteria now?
Sincerely,
John
Re: Immigration and Fourth Turning
No.
These days, I think the mere fact of waiting until middle school or (gasp!) high school to study a foreign language makes us retro. :lol: Homies start learning foreign languages in public school pre-K immersion programs at the age of four.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Americans have had enough of glitz and roar . . Foreboding has deepened, and spiritual currents have darkened . . .
THE FOURTH TURNING IS AT HAND.
See T4T, p. 253.
Awww.... their poor little minds must hurt! However, I suppose they'll be fine... certainly faring no worse than my French-speaking cousins who learned the language at home from my aunt.These days, I think the mere fact of waiting until middle school or (gasp!) high school to study a foreign language makes us retro. :lol: Homies start learning foreign languages in public school pre-K immersion programs at the age of four.
"Better hurry. There's a storm coming. His storm!!!" :-O -Abigail Freemantle, "The Stand" by Stephen King
Is It TFT Yet???
I think that the Fourth Turning will begin when the popularity of "On The Record with Greta Van Susteren" on FOX News suddenly drops.
_________________
Zanathusta's use of Stauss & Howe's T4T Quote Applies:
"Americans will have had enough of glitz and roar, of celebrity circuses, of living as though there were no tomorrow. . . The Fourth Turning will be at hand." T4T, p. 253
Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a wee bit too much structure in their young lives. No wonder Artists go nuts when they hit 40.Awww.... their poor little minds must hurt! However, I suppose they'll be fine... certainly faring no worse than my French-speaking cousins who learned the language at home from my aunt.These days, I think the mere fact of waiting until middle school or (gasp!) high school to study a foreign language makes us retro. :lol: Homies start learning foreign languages in public school pre-K immersion programs at the age of four.
Here is an article that speaks about the public reaction to Katrina and its aftermath. The reaction looks very 4T. IMO, this rhymes with the public reaction to the early Depression and the public reaction to the Coercive Acts of 1774. Of course, the major question is whether or not "The Katrina Effect" will lead to upheaval.
Excerpt: The Katrina Effect
Editor's Note: The following is excerpted with permission from All Together Now: Common Sense For a Fair Economy (Berrett-Koehler).
On August 29, 2005, the powerful hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans. An estimated one million people were evacuated from the area, though many of the poor, old, and ill were unable to leave and seek higher ground. Moreover, those left behind were overwhelmingly African American. The nation watched in horror as death and destruction flashed across our TV screens. We were inured to seeing such events unfold in third-world countries. How could they possibly occur in a major American city?
Equally unbelievable, the government response at all levels was late, insufficient, and widely considered by all sides to have been lethally bungled. President Bush, on vacation at the time, appeared not to grasp the magnitude of what was occurring until a day or two later. Even then, he was uncharacteristically off-key in his response. His initial comments that "America will be a stronger place" for going through the disaster seemed like spin, especially given the inadequate federal response.
As the tragedy wore on, the feds and local politicians started blaming each other. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, though created to react to such emergencies, was particularly inept. As reported by Los Angeles Times journalist Peter Gosselin, FEMA underwent a renaissance under Clinton, "speedily responding to the 1993 Mississippi flood, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and other disasters." When George W. Bush was elected, he gave the job of heading FEMA to his campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, who criticized his new charge as "an oversized entitlement program," suggesting that states and cities would be better off relying on "faith-based organizations."
Much of the public became transfixed by the disaster and its aftermath. For the media, it was all Katrina, all the time. As an economist who often comments on government data releases, I was asked in every interview about the economic impact of Katrina for weeks after the storm. As the days wore on, we learned to our disbelief about victims dying in homes, in hospitals, and on the flooded streets of their cities, especially New Orleans.
It seemed incomprehensible that we as a nation would be unprepared for such an emergency, especially after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Right underneath the surface of all this anxiety could be felt the pulse of a critically important national discussion about the role of government. A critique of the political and social philosophy I call YOYO ("You're on your own") coalesced amid the storm's wreckage. To be sure, there were those who dismissed the significance of FEMA's performance as just another example of governmental failure, but these were largely anti-government ideologues whose views appeared to be out of step with the mainstream. Few took seriously the notion that less government was necessary, before or after the event. To the contrary, the conservative majority in the federal government immediately began spending billions (over $60 billion in the first week, with billions more to follow, the most ever in response to a natural disaster) to redress the damage.
A conversation broke out on the op-ed pages, in blogs, in letters to the editor, wherein citizens actively wondered if we'd gone too far down the YOYO path. Liberal columnists like Paul Krugman lambasted the administration, connecting the dots between its ideology of individualism and its failure to rise to an occasion of such dire need. In an op-ed entitled "Killed by Contempt," he wrote:
"The federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?"
Letters to the editor during this period express with crystal clarity the stakes invoked by hyper-individualism. One letter argued that this breakdown of the social contract was directly related to the "starve the beast" mentality of those who would cripple the government by cutting off its revenue stream. The writer went on to assert that, contrary to the belief of those in charge, "'the beast' is not government. It is the insolence of those who believe that helping one's fellow citizens is not a duty, but an option."
"We have a president ... and a Congress whose agenda is to privatize risk by reducing public financing and dismantling public safeguards, including bankruptcy, Social Security, health insurance, and environmental and disaster protections. The level of the government's response to Katrina was as predictable as the hurricane itself. You get what you pay for.
This is what an ownership society looks like. This is what an ownership society means: we are each of us on our own.
Even conservative columnists such as David Brooks talked about the hurricane's aftermath as a unique opportunity to use the tools of government to address the deep economic and social inequities that remained so stark even as the floodwaters receded.
I'm not citing those letters and opinion pieces because I think they're right. I do, but what of it? There are surely letters and op-eds saying just the opposite. I'm citing them because they so precisely capture my point. Even before Katrina, many of us shared a sense that something was wrong with the extent to which we were shifting economic and social risks from shared sources to individuals. The privatization efforts by the government, the defunding of safety nets, the decision of businesses to drop worker pensions, changes in corporate norms that in earlier times protected jobs but now made workers more disposable--all of these ongoing risk shifts were already leading to a heightened sense of YOYO-induced insecurity. But the storm, and particularly its aftermath, shoved these concerns to the front burner for a growing number of citizens.
After the Storm: A Potentially Transformative Moment
Eventually stories of the flood receded from the front page, but the sentiments remained. As I mentioned, part of my job is to debate national economic policy, and I'm well aware that two economists hammering it out on CNBC as to whether the Bush tax cuts really created jobs, or whether the Federal Reserve should raise interest rates, seems more like weird entertainment than something that might yield useful insights. Yet, in the post-Katrina world, the discussion felt a lot more urgent. Suddenly, something important seemed to be riding on whether we could blithely add more than $100 billion to the deficit for rebuilding hurricane-damaged areas while engaging in further tax cuts for the wealthy. All of the sudden, we stumbled upon a potentially transformative moment in history and politics.
After the storm, at least for a while, there was a sense that it matters how we as a nation handle the responsibility of economic policy (and by we I mean the electorate, a bunch of people who collectively decide whom we appoint to set the nation's agenda). It matters how we approach the big problems of the day: globalization, national health care, taxes, our stagnating and ever more unequal incomes. But it also matters how we approach the problems in our everyday lives.
The incredibly uneven quality of our public schools, the eroding quality and cost shifting of employer-provided health care and pensions, the increasing insecurity of all jobs, not just those in manufacturing--all these problems link back to an ongoing shift in the way we view the role of government in our lives. That view has evolved from a mind-set that dates back to the Depression. Under that mind-set, which persisted until about a generation ago, more of us had a greater sense that we're all in this together and that it is our right and our privilege as a society to take the needed steps to ensure our economic security.
We've lost that sense. With the ascendancy of YOYO philosophy, we've lost the ability to come together and create the government we need to meet the economic and social challenges we face at every level. Under YOYO, we can neither shape the way globalization plays out in our lives, nor invest in quality education in our neighborhoods.
It is of course not the only important shift that's occurred. Obviously, our electorate is closely divided along various lines. But tragedy has a way of pushing our differences into the background. Red stater or blue stater, any one of us could have been caught in that storm, just as any of us could be caught in the sights of terrorists. In Katrina's aftermath, there existed, at least for a few weeks, an uneasy sense that the path down which YOYO politics has been taking us is as dangerous as it is unsustainable. And of course, many of us felt this long before the New Orleans levees gave way.
In this regard, when he asserted that America may well be a stronger place once we recover from this devastating blow, the president may have been right. But ironically, it will be because we once again see the danger in the type of government that his administration, with the help of the Congress, has so aggressively been pursuing. The Katrina debacle was a terrible wake-up call, reminding us of the costs of losing sight of our connections to each other.
"The urge to dream, and the will to enable it is fundamental to being human and have coincided with what it is to be American." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
intp '82er
3T
The President's response to immigration is pure 3T. He's going to send reservists on 2-week (yes) stints in border patrol offices, to free up a few more border patrolmen for real duty. This makes him look tough to the ocnservatives but will have zilch effect on the situation. It's further proof that politics still (and always will) drives everything in this Administration--results are incidental.
You cannot get into a 4T with this kind of leadership.
David K '47
3T. Unraveling.
Mentally Ill Troops Sent to Combat
Newspaper Report Says Military Ignoring Guidelines
HARTFORD, Conn. (May 14) - U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.....
AOL/Reuters News ^ | 5/14/2006
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt
Re: 3T
Likely this administration isn't going to bring us into full 4T mode. I'm of the school that says you have to have a consensus, and idea that something has to be done and how to go about it, before a final commitment to transformation is made.
But a Buchanon, Hoover or Bush can certainly set catalyst producing policies that bring a 4T closer, or make the problems to be solved worse.
