Originally Posted by pbrower2a

Let us all hope and pray that Governor Jindal (R-LA) handles the incoming hurricane far better than did Governor Blanco (D-LA) did.

Gag me, man, You wish no such thing. If things go badly in NO, you all will use it like you did the last time around. You, with the eager help of the media, have managed to actually politicize the damn weather for crying out loud.

Congrats, pal. At least for the time being. Sooner or later folks are gonna wise up to your lame-ass political bull shit.

Originally Posted by Bri2k

I've often wondered if there was any partisanship in the sluggish and bungled federal response to Katrina.

I found it odd that neighboring states with Republican governors got far more timely and effective aid from Washington.

They may sow the wind, but they shall reap the whirlwind.

Bri2k

NO PERSONAL ATTACK HERE, eh, Craig?

Get real. This kinda personal attack-shit is just typical each and every day here at 4t.com. I mean, we all know Bri2k speaks "truth to power," right, Craig?

I'm sorry Zilch, but how on earth does Bri2K's last post about the Katrina response constitute a personal attack against you? Do you just go hunting for childish arguments or what?

Originally Posted by Bri2k

I've often wondered if there was any partisanship in the sluggish and bungled federal response to Katrina.

I found it odd that neighboring states with Republican governors got far more timely and effective aid from Washington.

They may sow the wind, but they shall reap the whirlwind.

Bri2k

The United States has ordinarily been masterful in responding to natural disasters. I don't think it coincidental that Mississippi got swifter and more effective aid than did greater New Orleans. Louisiana might have been "barely" red in 2000 and 2004, but New Orleans was very blue. People in New Orleans might have expected to get the sort of help that Florida gets after hurricanes; they thought wrong.

I don't know how much of this is true, but I can only think of Karl Rove's "majority of a majority" method of gaining control: find a coalition of the base (people closely associated with the money sources of the Party), find some hangers-on with vague promises of acquiescence with cultural values that will cost little if granted [gun "rights", school prayer, an abortion ban] but failure in achieving will cost little because people with such values aren't going to the other way... but just enough to get a bare majority in the right places. The Base controls the bare majority, and the rest of the country is $crewed because loyalty to the "wrong" Party is evidence of disloyalty. Public projects, for example, are not to be done in "blue" areas. Rove's method is inherently totalitarian; it reflects how some totalitarian movements achieved power through coalitions that they controlled. He may not be a Nazi, a Commie, an Apartheid-ist, or a Ba'athist, but his methods have obvious parallels in places less fortunate than ours.

That's a fault of pure democracy -- that 51% of the public can vote to exploit and suppress the other 49% with impunity. That's why workable democracies establish constitutional safeguards of the rights of the minority. If there is enough electoral fraud or dirty tricks, then perhaps a near-majority can rule the majority harshly and profiteer from corruption.

Karl Rove's "majority of a majority" practice eventually ensures that the neglected areas get angry. Thus if the Bush Administration supports price gouging by the Oil Cartel, he of course ravages the auto industry -- which means that Texas does well, but Michigan gets $crewed. Because the Bush Administration doesn't need Michigan, you can be sure that auto manufacturers in Michigan are going to have a hard time. Rove's technique is not intended to grow a larger coalition; that might dilute the control that the Base has within the coalition.

The failure to expand the coalition implies that demographic shifts and cultural trends can turn a bare majority into a minority that can no longer rule. The rapid growth of Hispanic voting populations in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada may be enough to shift those States. Even Florida has a fast-growing population of non-Cuban Hispanics, and they are growing fast enough to flip the state politically. The Republican candidate for President in 2008 may lose one of Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada but absolutely must win Florida to win. Ohio has been treated badly under Rove and Dubya, and about all that could keep Ohio "red" is continued strength of the Christian Fundamentalist voters. But the kids (Millennial young adults aren't as attracted to the Religious Right as are their parents) are running away from right-wing Fundamentalism, and the deaths of Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy strip Christian Fundamentalism of two of its best organizers. McCain absolutely must win Ohio to become President. Much the same is true in Virginia as in Ohio. The 2006 elections suggest that the coalition that Karl Rove engineered has been slipping.

(An aside: as I went to vote in 2004 I had awakened with the near-certainty of a Kerry victory. As I was about to leave for the polls I flipped through the channel and heard some Fundamentalist televangelist tell his obedient flock to make sure to vote in this election as if you are choosing between Heaven and Hell... and you can imagine what partisan direction that was. I still voted for Kerry, but I was no longer certain that he would win).

I believe that the Republican Party is trying to win in much the same way in 2008. The Base remains -- Big Oil, the military-industrial complex, sub-prime lending, and economic interests that want abysmal wages for their workers. The rest is shrinking and the GOP seems unable so far to find support elsewhere.

Look at it this way: the Democrats are trying to do everything to associate John McCain with George Worthless Bush. John McCain has the difficult task of convincing the GOP Base that he is with them while presenting himself and his VP candidate as reformers. That is a huge contradiction, and it lacks the power of force or fraud behind it.

Originally Posted by zilch

NO PERSONAL ATTACK HERE, eh, Craig?

Get real. This kinda personal attack-shit is just typical each and every day here at 4t.com. I mean, we all know Bri2k speaks "truth to power," right, Craig?

Not only do I not see a personal attack here, I have seen Zilch continue to attack people and use profanity after he was asked to stop.

For refusing to follow the forum rules after I asked, and making it clear in his personal reply to me and in his most recent posts above that he would not follow the rules, I have revoked zilch's posting privileges.

If you want to discuss this action or the forum rules, please go here: http://fourthturning.com/forum/showthread.php?p=243936. Otherwise, please try to return to the topic of this thread.

-- Craig

Originally Posted by webmaster

Not only do I not see a personal attack here, I have seen Zilch continue to attack people and use profanity after he was asked to stop.

For refusing to follow the forum rules after I asked, and making it clear in his personal reply to me and in his most recent posts above that he would not follow the rules, I have revoked zilch's posting privileges.

If you want to discuss this action or the forum rules, please go here: http://fourthturning.com/forum/showthread.php?p=243936. Otherwise, please try to return to the topic of this thread.

-- Craig

Is the banning of Marc Lamb from this site a sign that We B 4T?

The official reaction to Gustav shows 4T. So does this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...se-stress.html

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

Is the banning of Marc Lamb from this site a sign that We B 4T?

No, it's just a sign that zilch went too far and became irrelevant.



.

Originally Posted by zilch

NO PERSONAL ATTACK HERE, eh, Craig?

Get real. This kinda personal attack-shit is just typical each and every day here at 4t.com. I mean, we all know Bri2k speaks "truth to power," right, Craig?

Status: Banned

*gloats*

I'm now the only Lamb here, for the first time since November 2000. I can't tell you what a relief that is.

Yesterday as I came in from the garden with a basket of basil because of this frosty morn forewarned, the WELY radio station informed me that a jury was being impanelled for Mr. O. J. Simpson. Contra our initial, and now only, Mr. Lamb, we be 3T.

Living in Australia which is still very much in an unraveling, I am yet to be convinced that North America has entered the Fourth Turning yet. I'm interested in you North Americans observations to either support or refute my assumption North America has not reached the 4T yet.

Originally Posted by Virgil K. Saari

Yesterday as I came in from the garden with a basket of basil because of this frosty morn forewarned, the WELY radio station informed me that a jury was being impanelled for Mr. O. J. Simpson. Contra our initial, and now only, Mr. Lamb, we be 3T.

People can and do get charged for crimes in every turning, including celebrities. The issue at hand is not whether O.J. Simpson is on trial, but whether there is an O.J. Trial going on, in that sense. It's about if there is a media circus or anything of that nature, or if it just gets some mild coverage and nobody cares. I was only 7-8 during the last O.J. trial and that was a HUGE deal. Everyone knew about it and cared about it. I highly doubt that will be the case this time.

Is there any doubt now whether we are 3T or 4T?

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

Is there any doubt now whether we are 3T or 4T?

At this point, I think we are past the gray 3T/4T cusp. The Crisis has catalyzed. If Generations were updated some years later, I think it we would be in the Crisis social-moment right now, which started with the Democratic primaries around the start of 2008 and currently leads to the critical economic events of September.

Please attend to Ms. Terry Gross' Fresh Air on NPR of this evening, 17 September 2008, for an explanation on why the current discomforts in the credit system are being handled in the main outside the Judicial System (at least until after the last Election of the 3T).

In Bankruptcy, a determination of value will have to be discovered for the imagination filled products that the Financial Houses hold as assets as a matter of Fact. When, this is done for one; all will have some yardstick (or micrometer) of the value of the assets in their accountbooks. Federal seizure and bailout outside the Majesty of the Law allows the pretence of value to obtain until the results of the Extension of the Franchise has produced its result in November.

The accounting will come in the next Term of Congress and shock will be expressed. But, for the non, the value of assets will be of the "We Create Our Own Reality" sort until the wheels of Justice begin their slow milling.

I can see a reconcilation on the model put forward by the Hon. Robt. Mugabe when the truth does out. Perhaps a Commission with the Creatures of Mr. Chas. Keating, Mr. Tony Rezko, the Rose Law Firm, and the Hon. Chas. Rangel who have some experience in matters real estated would be of service to Our Commercial Republic.

Originally Posted by Mr. Reed

At this point, I think we are past the gray 3T/4T cusp. The Crisis has catalyzed. If Generations were updated some years later, I think we would be in the Crisis social-moment right now, which started with the Democratic primaries around the start of 2008 and currently leads to the critical economic events of September.

I would tend to agree. In fact, I am finding it hard to resist the temptation to see the current economic developments as the start of the Great Devaluation. Of course, the Crisis Social Moment could also have started with the first hints of economic bad news last fall, in the subprime mortgage market.

can see a reconcilation on the model put forward by the Hon. Robt. Mugabe when the truth does out. Perhaps a Commission with the Creatures of Mr. Chas. Keating, Mr. Tony Rezko, the Rose Law Firm, and the Hon. Chas. Rangel who have some experience in matters real estated would be of service to Our Commercial Republic.

Can we add Jamie Gorelick to this commission? she's been on all the other show trials.

Last night, when I first got to work, I overheard a customer talking to two cops. For all who read this, see if this seems as ridiculous to you as it did to me when I heard it, and to him when he said it.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Unknown Customer
"Gas is making like it's the 70s, the Stock Market is making like it's 1929, but some people are still hung up on whether Barry Bonds is using steriods."

I mean, that sounds so 3T, even as the 4T is hitting us squarely in the face.

Originally Posted by SVE-KRD

Last night, when I first got to work, I overheard a customer talking to two cops. For all who read this, see if this seems as ridiculous to you as it did to me when I heard it, and to him when he said it.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Unknown Customer
"Gas is making like it's the 70s, the Stock Market is making like it's 1929, but some people are still hung up on whether Barry Bonds is using steriods."

I mean, that sounds so 3T, even as the 4T is hitting us squarely in the face.

Well, when stocks were tumbling and banks closing, alot of people were riveted by the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

Well, when stocks were tumbling and banks closing, alot of people were riveted by the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

Well, not really. The market hit bottom in March 1933. The banking crisis was Jan- March 1933 during the Hoover lame duck period and the Lindbergh kidnapping was in summer 1932. The police did not find Bruno Hauptman or know about him until Sept 1934 and the trial took place in Jan-Feb 1935.

But your point is precisely correct. Events happen that do not affect ordinary life and distractions, yet become momentous in the rear view mirror. I think the government's acquisition of AIG may be such an event and that happened over the weekend while lots of people were watching SNL.

Won't it seem that way when we routinely get AIG insurance flyers along with our IRS refund checks?

September 22, 2008
Falling Into Fall

So many shoes are poised to drop this week that the American scene might be confused for the world's greatest-ever clog dancing festival, but a closer look will reveal a circle of cavorting skeletons.

Last week's ripe moment turned out to be the Thursday night Washington photo op when Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chief Bernanke emerged from a huddle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and just about every other legislative eminentissimo in an attempt to reassure the nation that its financial system had not turned into something like unto a truckload of stinking dead carp. I don't know about you, but I got two distinct vibes from the faces in that particular tableau: 1.) abject fear, and 2.) a total lack of conviction that they knew what they were doing.

The product of that huddle was a cockamamie scheme for the US treasury to absorb all the losses from a twenty-year binge in which Wall Street created and retailed the most complex set of swindles ever seen on this planet Earth. The background music to the tableau was the whoosh of a several trillion dollars exiting the US financial system never to be seen again.

The next day (Friday) many particulars of that scheme began to emerge -- such as the complete lack of oversight and review mechanisms for Treasury's new power to monetize private business failures and frauds -- and the stock market soared in response. Other new features of the reformed capital landscape also resolved later that day, like a new experiment aimed at eliminating the short sale as a way of guaranteeing that henceforth market bets could only be placed on the upside of the table. It will be interesting to see how that reform works out in the days ahead.

Over the weekend, all these various playerz retreated into their gilded bunkers to negotiate the details, and by Sunday night, among other things, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- the two remaining investment giants left standing -- announced that they would metamorphose into regular banks in order to qualify for additional truckloads of government loans in exchange for any leftover fraudulant securities still lurking in their vaults. Another new provision had the Treasury rescuing swindled foreign companies, too -- in effect, saving the world, which seemed at least, how you say, pretty ambitious.

By this morning, many new arguments had been raised by a suddenly de-zombified congress as to whether the proposed grand bail-out might reward recent Wall Street turpitudes and incentivize future mis-deeds and it looks like enough objections may be lodged to gum-up the process before it even goes into effect -- which, of course, would tend to revert the whole reeking cargo of trouble to its original train-wreck trajectory. I guess we'll see what happens now.

Any way you paint this grotesque panorama, it looks like a very new chapter of history for life in the USA. Basically, we are a much poorer nation than we were even a couple of years ago, and we have a much-reduced ability to project our will around the world, or even among our own floundering sectors and regions. Most troubling to me is the question of legitimacy that now hangs over the proscenium like a guillotine blade. Factoring in the old saw that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes, I think the situation emerging is rather like the crisis of legitimacy that preceded the Civil War. Then, in the 1850s, the nation's two symbiotic political parties, Whig and Democrat, entered a zone of fatal discredit. The White House had been occupied by a sequence of empty cravats named Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, and so much pent-up mistrust roiled the centers of power that the nation entered a convulsion.

At issue then was the great festering unresolved polity of slavery. The Whig party, in its oafish, craven fecklessness, disappeared so quickly from the scene that an embarrassed God Almighty seemed to have hooked it off-stage in a nanosecond. Into the vacuum stepped an awkward lawyer from Illinois -- widely mocked by the coarser elements of what was then called the press as a figure resembling an ape in a stovepipe hat. He accomplished one crucial thing in the process of his emergence: he deployed a potent rhetoric that captured the essence of the crisis and clarified it for all to understand what was at stake -- and then the convulsion commenced in earnest.

The Republican Party amounts to today's Whigs. Their candidate for president, John McCain, is trying to run away from his own party -- as one might shrink away from a colony of importuning lepers. I am actually not kidding when I label the Republicans "the party that wrecked America," because I believe that is truly how the popular strain of history will regard them when (maybe if) the wreckage of their ministrations ever clears. But history doesn't repeat exactly. The current figure from Illinois, Barrack Obama, has yet to offer a truly crisis-clarfying rhetoric, though he labors under the expectation of being able to do so. Like his long-ago predecessor, he is mocked by the coarser elements of what we call "the media" these days -- Fox News and the moron-rousers of talk radio.

Some of the issues yet-to-be-clarified concern the behavior of the American public in the broad sense. We have obdurately resisted the reality of the energy crisis that hangs over everything we do (as slavery hung over the 1850s), from the way we inhabit the landscape to the way we do daily business in our 240-million-plus fleet of cars and trucks that ply the ribbons of asphalt and the lagoons of parking that now run from sea to shining sea where the fruited plain was replaced by the Wal Marts.

Mr. Obama isn't kidding either when he alludes to the change America faces, though history has not yet rhymed enough for his rhetoric to really set forth the terms of this change in its stark particulars. And even if he is able to articulate these things, he won't forestall the convulsion anymore than Lincoln held back a war between the states. That prior crisis was when America learned good and hard how tragic life could be, and it colored our national character for a century -- until we chucked it all to become a society of overfed clowns, with God Almighty replaced by Ronald McDonald. That pageant of happy idiocy is now ending. Like everyone else in this fraught and nervous land, I'm standing by to see what transpires in the days just ahead.

http://www.kunstler.com/

I'm still of the cascade school, and don't like to point at any one event and identify it as "The Catalyst," preferring to point at a bunch of events that illustrate different problems that have to be addressed.

But just watching the news last night, surfing between PBS and the major networks, with all the talk about the economic bail out, I heard the word 'crisis' an awful lot. There were several calls for two party commissions and cooperation as per September 11th. There was one quote saying the country is in as great a crisis as it has seen since World War II.

I'm getting a sense that the current bail out combined with the pending elections are going to be at least as significant as September 11th or Katrina. I could easily see a clear values shift coming out of it, a true regeneracy, a commitment to roll up everyone's sleeves and get it on.

But I'm not going to call anything a done deal yet.

In one of my last conversations with Bill Strauss, we discussed some of the havoc wrought by the Boom, but I commented that things could have been worse. "You mean," he said, "we haven't started a civil war yet?"

No, we haven't; but by 1) creating the crisis through classic Boom self-indulgence on Wall Street, and 2) failing to agree on a temporary remedy through partisanship in the Boom-dominated House of Representatives, we have created an almost equally profound crisis in our national life.

This is it--without question. I move that this thread be closed. Any seconds?

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

In one of my last conversations with Bill Strauss, we discussed some of the havoc wrought by the Boom, but I commented that things could have been worse. "You mean," he said, "we haven't started a civil war yet?"

No, we haven't; but by 1) creating the crisis through classic Boom self-indulgence on Wall Street, and 2) failing to agree on a temporary remedy through partisanship in the Boom-dominated House of Representatives, we have created an almost equally profound crisis in our national life.

This is it--without question. I move that this thread be closed. Any seconds?

It's the early 1920s and the prices of farm produce and farm land are collapsing even as supply grows every year. The same is true financial produce and "housing".

Overproduction of created abodes and/or created realities need not be the CRISIS anymore than was the cornucopia of small grains.


The Celestials are going Lunar and Commercial Republicans with Turning Yearning are going Lunatick>>>-----> (in the traditional Roundheaded Blue Zone Manner).

Let Barack & Sarah, John & Joe entertain us as we enter the last years of the Unravelling.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

In one of my last conversations with Bill Strauss, we discussed some of the havoc wrought by the Boom, but I commented that things could have been worse. "You mean," he said, "we haven't started a civil war yet?"

No, we haven't; but by 1) creating the crisis through classic Boom self-indulgence on Wall Street, and 2) failing to agree on a temporary remedy through partisanship in the Boom-dominated House of Representatives, we have created an almost equally profound crisis in our national life.

This is it--without question. I move that this thread be closed. Any seconds?

Does Neil Howe agree? He hasn't released anything yet on the events of this year. I definitely think that we are in a Crisis. But it is not totally unanimous. When the agreement is unanimous, I think this thread will fizzle on its own. No need to close it down.