Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

True, but California is on board with AGW. Tornado Alley, on the other hand, will blow away before any state in that cluster concedes an inch.

Blow away form what, tornadoes or dust storms?

The winter wheat crop looks really bad. Dunno why sorghum wasn't chosen, since it worked OK last year in some fields. I'm gonna plant some sorghum and millet for myself in a bare spot I have on the west side of my house.

From 1958, directed by Fritz Capra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=0lgzz-L7GFg

The concern is hardly new.

The two states to the north of California:





This is consistent with a shift of rainfall patterns in which winter rains fail in what could become the Cali-Namib Desert.

Guess where California will need to get water from?

In the 6 April 2015 number of The New Yorker in its Dept. of The Environment, Mr. Jonathan Franzen writes in Carbon Capture: “...Maybe it’s because I was raised a Protestant and became an environmentalist, but I’ve long been struck by the spiritual kinship of environmentalism and New England Puritanism. Both belief systems are haunted by the feeling that simple t0 be human is to be guilty. ...And now climate change has given us an eschatology for reckoning with our guilt: coming soon, some hellishly overheated tomorrow, is Judgement Day. Unless we repent and mend our ways, we’ll all be sinners in the hands of an angry Earth.


...But climate change is seductive to organizations that want to be taken seriously. Besides a ready-made meme, it’s usefully imponderable: ...Climate change is everyone’s fault -- in other words, no one’s. We can all feel good about deploring it.


...Climate change shares many attributes of the economic system that’s accelerating it. Like capitalism, it is transnational, unpredictably destructive, self-compounding, and inescapable. It defies individual resistance, creates big winners and big losers, and tends toward a global monoculture -- the extinction of difference at the species level, a monoculture of agenda at the institutional level. It also meshes nicely with the tech industry, by fostering the idea that only tech ... can solve the problems of greenhouse-gas emissions. As a narrative, climate change is almost as simple as ‘Markets are efficient.’ ”




For the Meme thy Climate Change is a jealous Meme:




In the 10 April 2015 number of the Timberjay (Cook-Tower-Ely, MN), the publisher, Mr. Marshall Helmberger, writes in his article Moose calf mystery solved: Too many wolves: “For several years the Department of (MN) Natural Resources has conducted millions of dollars worth of research trying to determine why it seems our regions moose herd if disappearing.
Since early on in the effort, researchers have focused on warmer temperatures,...


But in the rush to demonstrate a climate-related connection, the DNR has, at least to date, downplayed a much more direct cause of the moose decline; wolves.
It comes down to Occam’s razor, the principle that the most likely answer to a question or problem is the most straightforward, requiring the fewest assumptions.”

More global warming is coming.

Pacific Current Change Slowed Global Warming
A cooler ocean phase has allowed the waters to absorb more heat
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._id=SA_Twitter
… ""Because the ocean is in contact with the atmosphere, there's heat exchange between the atmosphere and the surface ocean," he said. "It seems that about 90 percent of the heat that should be in the atmosphere right now with all that extra CO2 [humans have emitted since 1999] has gone into the ocean."
That has lead to a temporary pause in global temperature rise from climate change.”…

Moose also avoid dogs, which are wolves to all wild animals and most livestock. Feral dogs are as lethal predators as wolves.

Power of Wind
from grassroots@awea.org
Hi Eric-- (and forwarded here to T4Ters by Eric!)

Hot off the presses, I wanted to share with you the latest information about wind energy here at home – as reported in the American Wind Energy Association’s 2014 U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report.

The exciting trends we’re seeing show us that our federal policy has been working. However, our energy future is at a crossroads. Our common sense policy – the renewable energy production tax credit (PTC) – expired on December 31st! I need to ask for your help to push your legislators to renew this important incentive.

Please take a look at this summary of where wind power stands today, and share it with your federal officials. Let them know that we need more predictable policy to keep this American success story going.

Here are the top trends we are seeing in U.S. wind power:

1. Wind power is reaching more American families.

16.7 Million American Homes

During 2014, American wind power generated enough electricity for 16.7 million average American homes. With a record amount of wind power under construction today, and efforts moving forward to build new transmission infrastructure between windy, often remote locations and populated areas, American families are on track to have even greater opportunities to access to clean power.

2. Wind power is becoming more affordable.

The cost of wind energy dropped over 50% in the past five years, with the industry continuing to advance technology in several areas. Improved siting techniques, larger rotor diameters, and taller towers are increasing energy production across the country and making wind power a better fit for more places.

3. Wind power is employing Americans in every state.

73,000 American Jobs

2014 saw a rebound of the wind industry jobs that were lost due to policy uncertainty in 2013. The wind industry added 23,000 jobs, bringing the total to 73,000, spread across all 50 states. These jobs are directly associated with wind energy project planning, siting, development, construction, manufacturing, supply chain, and operations.

4. Wind power is in demand.

While other fuel source prices change, wind's fuel price stays the same – free. An increasingly diverse group of purchasers are locking in stable energy prices by choosing wind power. About 75% of the agreements to purchase wind power in 2014 were with utility companies, and about 25% were with other entities – corporations, like Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, and Yahoo!, schools, including the University System of Maryland and Cornell University, and a federal government agency, the General Services Administration.

5. Wind power is providing significant water savings and carbon pollution reductions.

One Turbine Avoids 900 Cars Worth of Pollution

In 2014, we avoided 26.4 million cars worth of carbon pollution by generating electricity from wind power. Additionally, wind power generation reduced power plant water consumption by approximately 68 billion gallons, the equivalent of roughly 215 gallons per person in the U.S.

Please take a moment to share these updates with your federal legislators, and emphasize that you want to see these trends continue. With stable policy, the wind energy industry is positioned to achieve the growth described in the U.S. Department of Energy’s recently released Wind Vision report – double within the next five years to supply 10% of U.S. electricity by 2020, 20% by 2030, and 35% by 2050.

Thank you in advance for your help! And, if you’re interested in taking a deeper dive into the wind energy numbers, please take a look at the executive summary of the 2014 U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report.

Mary Kate Francis


Sincerely,

Mary Kate Francis
Director, Community Engagement

Originally Posted by radind

More global warming is coming.

Warming the cooling buffer takes much energy, but once the buffer is warmed the effect of the buffer goes from being a heat sink to being a heat source.

Solar Power Generation Could Exceed California's Demand Up to 5 Times

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/...demand-5-times

First quarter of 2015 hottest on record:

http://www.examiner.com/article/eart...mest-on-record



On Friday in the agency’s monthly global analysis, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. reported that at 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century baseline, the March 2015 global combined land and sea average surface temperature was the warmest March on record. Furthermore, the NCDC noted that at 1.48 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century baseline, the first quarter of 2015 was the warmest on record for the January through March three-month period since records began in 1880.

Previously, 2010 had held the March record. Over the past twelve months May, June, August, September, October and December of 2014 and March 2015 have either set or tied monthly temperature records for global warmth.

Global warming is a Myth propagated by pacifists and weaklings who want to dismantle civilization and create a pacifist utopia without war and without any acknowledgement of the other side of human nature. The money grubbing pacifists and boomer ideologues are like how tytos governed the lannisters in the backstory of game of thrones before tywin cleaned up the mess. The future leaders whom late-wave xers and first-wave millies would be the vanguard of a new movement whose principles would be similar to the doctrines I've outlined before and designated "restorationism" will OUT OF NECCESSITY be the role of the future tywin.

Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86

Global warming is a Myth propagated by pacifists and weaklings who want to dismantle civilization and create a pacifist utopia without war and without any acknowledgement of the other side of human nature. The money grubbing pacifists and boomer ideologues are like how tytos governed the lannisters in the backstory of game of thrones before tywin cleaned up the mess. The future leaders whom late-wave xers and first-wave millies would be the vanguard of a new movement whose principles would be similar to the doctrines I've outlined before and designated "restorationism" will OUT OF NECCESSITY be the role of the future tywin.

I've believed that competition for political, military, territorial and economic power was healthy for the human race, up about to the time of the machine gun, and had become truly problematic by the time of the atomic bomb. Before that time, racist haters would chant about the superiority of their particular culture, justify endless bloodshed, and the human race could overwhelm the damage done by the warriors by numbers and by burning large amounts of coal and oil. Somewhere around the US Civil War the power gained through force and bloodshot stopped exceeding the reward. World War II demonstrated the increasing futility of the might makes power hypothesis. Fortunately, it was obvious enough that no one heated the Cold War.

But there are lots of folks today using insurgency, proxy war and terror tactics thinking they can achieve various political, religious and territorial goals through force. I can still smugly say from a safe perch atop the Western value system that such war is not cost effective. It's just that this might not be a crucial fact. Cost effectiveness is a western principle not universally shared. If one has a religious or militaristic value system, or if a group and their friends can twist Allah's words to justify organized rape, destruction of the economy and genocide, all in the name of power and a good time by all riding around in pickup tricks shooting firearms in the air, the principle of cost effectiveness isn't much of a telling argument.

Clinton 42 was bumbling towards a principle that stable states should quash failed states, that crimes of humanity ought not be tolerated on the global level. Bush 43, by de-emphasizing the crimes of humanity aspect, by throwing in war for oil, expansion of democracy, and suppression of weapons of mass destruction while not understanding the difficulties of ethnic, religious, tribal, and political disunity, mucked up Clinton 42's preliminary consensus. The result is chaos. Still, as we're using new methods to acquire oil, chaos doesn't seem to matter too much anymore.

There may be some still nostalgic for the days when powerful western nations would begin wars of expansion whenever they could afford to do so. I'm not one of these. The old values associated with ongoing habitual war of aggression were problematic to say the least. This is not to say all conflict can be dismissed through the optimistic and enthusiastic application of wishful thinking. Humanity is a territorial and aggressive species which seems reluctant to admit it is a territorial and aggressive species. Too many existing cultures were built on massive foundations of strong and active militaries. Young impressionistic fools will hear the blowing of bugles and fall into marching formations. We are what we are.

The path to something else is not clear and obvious save in one thing... the path does not lead backwards.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

First quarter of 2015 hottest on record:

http://www.examiner.com/article/eart...mest-on-record



On Friday in the agency’s monthly global analysis, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. reported that at 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century baseline, the March 2015 global combined land and sea average surface temperature was the warmest March on record. Furthermore, the NCDC noted that at 1.48 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century baseline, the first quarter of 2015 was the warmest on record for the January through March three-month period since records began in 1880.

Previously, 2010 had held the March record. Over the past twelve months May, June, August, September, October and December of 2014 and March 2015 have either set or tied monthly temperature records for global warmth.

...But it was brutally cold in eastern Canada and the northeastern quadrant of the United States, as Ted Cruz reminds us! And we need to consume even more fossil fuels, says the Right.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Solar Power Generation Could Exceed California's Demand Up to 5 Times

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/...demand-5-times

Yes, but only during the day.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

First quarter of 2015 hottest on record:

http://www.examiner.com/article/eart...mest-on-record



On Friday in the agency’s monthly global analysis, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. reported that at 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century baseline, the March 2015 global combined land and sea average surface temperature was the warmest March on record. Furthermore, the NCDC noted that at 1.48 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century baseline, the first quarter of 2015 was the warmest on record for the January through March three-month period since records began in 1880.

Previously, 2010 had held the March record. Over the past twelve months May, June, August, September, October and December of 2014 and March 2015 have either set or tied monthly temperature records for global warmth.

There is a pair of too close opposites on the map shown above. Most of North America is quite warm. The northwest Atlantic is quite cold. Hot and cold close together result in stormy weather.

This is one thing for a single abnormal season, which is all it is so far. It is easy to hope or fear that the last abnormal season foreshadows a new normal that is to come. It's too soon to be seeing or foreseeing new normals. We are still very early in a move into no man's land.

But some have warned that the cooling of the North Atlantic reflects a slowing of the Gulf Stream. That would carry a lot of momentum with it. Once changed it would not lightly change back. If so, a repeat of some aspects of last winter's pattern could become chronic.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Yes, but only during the day.

Telsa is going to be building batteries. This could be the sort of transforming infrastructure building project one would expect of a First Turning. I'm still thinking we are whiffing on the Fourth Turning, that the powers-that-be are managing to stalemate any chance at a political and values upheaval. Doesn't mean everything has to stagnate.

It will, of course, take a lot of batteries. Then again, 1T infrastructure projects can be formidable.

Originally Posted by B Butler

Telsa is going to be building batteries. This could be the sort of transforming infrastructure building project one would expect of a First Turning. I'm still thinking we are whiffing on the Fourth Turning, that the powers-that-be are managing to stalemate any chance at a political and values upheaval. Doesn't mean everything has to stagnate.

It will, of course, take a lot of batteries. Then again, 1T infrastructure projects can be formidable.

Beat me to it. Good post. I can't really add anymore.

Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86

Global warming is a Myth propagated by pacifists and weaklings who want to dismantle civilization and create a pacifist utopia without war and without any acknowledgement of the other side of human nature. The money grubbing pacifists and boomer ideologues are like how tytos governed the lannisters in the backstory of game of thrones before tywin cleaned up the mess. The future leaders whom late-wave xers and first-wave millies would be the vanguard of a new movement whose principles would be similar to the doctrines I've outlined before and designated "restorationism" will OUT OF NECCESSITY be the role of the future tywin.

I am so proud to be a Boomer "ideologue" pacifist. The future depends on us being listened to, and not the cynical Xers (though maybe also to non-cynical Xers ). The money-grubbing cynic heroes are corrupting our civilization by making it dependent on wars, most of which are totally unnecessary, as well as money-chasing. I know nothing of Game of Thrones, but I know that, a) life is a game, not a war, and b) thrones are an anachronism, and the more we can move away from unquestioned obedience to authority and conventional wisdom, the more truly "civilized" we will be.

Civilization is based on energy and ambition, curiosity, sensitivity and willingness to trust and relate to people in peace. War is failure; it is a breakdown of civilization into sheer murder. The "other side" of human nature is essentially unreal, and exists only through ignorance and habits of fear and indulgence. Spiritual training and journey, as taught by masters like Buddha and Jesus, plus physical fitness and sensual potency, and not self-destructive, obedience-oriented military training, is the way toward human enlightenment and progress beyond war and money-grubbing. As we move into the future, it is spiritual training and wisdom that will be seen as of "necessity."

Originally Posted by B Butler

Tesla is going to be building batteries. This could be the sort of transforming infrastructure building project one would expect of a First Turning. I'm still thinking we are whiffing on the Fourth Turning, that the powers-that-be are managing to stalemate any chance at a political and values upheaval. Doesn't mean everything has to stagnate.

Yes, it does.

But it doesn't mean we need to mistake 2001, 2003 or 2005 for the start of the 4T, and thus mistake our position in history and ignore the fact that the 2010s are 1850s redux, which means that the powers-that-be are far from preventing the political and values upheaval in this 4T upon which ANY future 1T depends that will be anything other than adjustment to steep and inevitable decline.

It will, of course, take a lot of batteries. Then again, 1T infrastructure projects can be formidable.

They WILL be, because (and only because) the energy released in the late 4T will power us forward toward these projects. The mind of today's 1850s muddling-through redux will boggle at the energy and change we will experience both in the late 4T and the next 1T, according to my prediction (which is decades-old now). And my success rate in prediction is probably better than anyone else's, so pay attention, and don't forget.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Yes, but only during the day.

All day, every day.

Originally Posted by B Butler

There is a pair of too close opposites on the map shown above. Most of North America is quite warm. The northwest Atlantic is quite cold. Hot and cold close together result in stormy weather.

It was cold and dry in Michigan. Usually a persistent snowpack simply protects soil moisture and melts to deliver moisture. The cold, dry spell left behind yellowish grass this year, indicating a drought.

Global warming will have strange results. Even in California, the results could be crazy. One is that the westerlies disappear in the winter and with them the rain. Another is that the warm, humid air masses from the tropical Pacific find their way into coastal California in the winter and any disturbance causes heavy rain in coastal areas and snow in the mountains.

Three years ago Michigan had record warmth in March... strange things are happening.

This is one thing for a single abnormal season, which is all it is so far. It is easy to hope or fear that the last abnormal season foreshadows a new normal that is to come. It's too soon to be seeing or foreseeing new normals. We are still very early in a move into no man's land.

As is an old saying with Midwest farmers, the three most reliable authorities on the quality of a growing season are "I. Hope", "U. Hope", and "W.E. Hope". "Bob Hope" was only entertainment.

At the least we need slow down global warming.

But some have warned that the cooling of the North Atlantic reflects a slowing of the Gulf Stream. That would carry a lot of momentum with it. Once changed it would not lightly change back. If so, a repeat of some aspects of last winter's pattern could become chronic.

It looks more like cold, fresh water that was recently part of the Greenland Ice Cap having forced its way into the North Atlantic, where it pushes the Gulf Stream farther from the American East Coast. But once the Greenland Ice Sheet is gone, the big problem for people in the lowlands of the eastern part of North America will not be the growing season.

Global warming implies at the least if abrupt crop failures in the short term and unreliable adaptations, In the long term it will imply hundreds of billions of refugees from what are now some of the prime croplands of the world.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

But it doesn't mean we need to mistake 2001, 2003 or 2005 for the start of the 4T, and thus mistake our position in history and ignore the fact that the 2010s are 1850s redux, which means that the powers-that-be are far from preventing the political and values upheaval in this 4T upon which ANY future 1T depends that will be anything other than adjustment to steep and inevitable decline.

I still see September 11th and Bush 43's follow up wars as transforming. We went from accusations of "wag the dog", an unwillingness to commit to conflict for any reason, to serial preemptive war of choice. As soon as one of our conquests was sort of almost stable, we'd build bases to launch the next conquest. We then recognized the lessons learned, that the reality didn't match the neo con wet dream. We're willing to consider action carefully at this point, while being in no hurry at all to commit ground troops and acknowledging the costs in blood and gold. The Republicans and Democrats of the Bush 43 era weren't fighting a war in the Middle East. They were attempting to vindicate their very different spins on Vietnam. Now, instead of two conflicting value based knee jerk reactions to potential conflict, there is far better consensus that you avoid war if you can, but can't presume that the last war is behind us.

We learned a lot, but seem reluctant to acknowledge this as it would in part acknowledge that the other side's values had considerable merit. I am very disappointed that people are not acknowledging the importance or degree of the values change. I fear we are pretending so hard that the values change never existed that we'll have to learn the same lessons again some day. Of course, you are still promoting the Love and Peace values of the 60s, and are apt to continue to do so, regardless of ongoing failed states, of economic collapse, organized rape and ongoing genocide. If you close your eyes you can avoid seeing these things. If one disregards reality there is no real need to act.

I anticipated that Bush 43's collapsed economy would trigger a second phase of the current crisis season, the economic half. As soon as Obama loaded his economic posts with Wall Street insiders, I knew it wouldn't happen on his watch. In some ways this is just as well. We put an (expletive deleted) band aid on a huge problem, and survived it without a total disaster. Alas, we needed the total disaster in order to have the motivation to cast down the whole system. With the notable exception of Elizabeth Warren, no one is preaching transformation. While a lot of people sympathize with her perspective, she isn't riding a tidal wave. There is no underlaying groundswell pushing her. There is no spiral of rhetoric building to overthrow the system.

I have long suspected the community at T4T is one of folks who perceive grave flaws and desire great changes. The notion of large transitions is attractive to dissatisfied revolutionaries. Whether we want your new age of 1960s wonder, Cynic's return to the militarism of the past, or whatever vision each of us holds in our mind, the status quo doesn't seem satisfactory. We are open to the suggestion that upheaval is natural to inevitable.

But to an awful lot of people, the status quo doesn't look all that bad. Were not seeing the equivalent energy to the massive unemployment that enabled the New Deal or the moral disaster that was slavery. Two of today's better positioned presidential candidates bear the Clinton and Bush names that are well seeped in unravelling values and policies. The Blue / Red divide is not rising towards a crescendo, but limping along as stagnant as ever.

In some ways I hope I'm wrong, but the way things look we might well muddle in place until Global Warming becomes undeniable and the Green Awakening explodes. Even that might not happen if building batteries becomes profitable, if the path to a green future is well paved before the potential Generation Green finds their lungs.

Anyway, it isn't just you, Eric, there are a lot of us who look to our values as a compass pointing to the future. A lot of us think the future will be or must be a reflection of our personal values, that The Theory is a mechanism that justifies how our own personal ways of looking at things can and must triumph. I see the patterns S & H found in history as illustrating how major transformation can occur and finding a rhythm that applied well when changing technology demanded changing society. It is not clear the demand for change is still in place.

Prior crises required changes in government structure. Kings and dictators needed to be overthrown. Political power held concentrated by a hereditary landowning and military class had to be defused. Democracy and human rights were profound tools that needed to be advanced if problems like slavery and the Gilded Age's boom bust economies with extreme poverty were to be addressed.

At the moment, the downtrodden masses seem content eating cake and playing video games. I can admire your echoes of the zeal of the 1960s. I'm very fond of the transformations that took place in those times, myself. That's not the wave of the future though, now. That wave has hit the beach and rolled back out to sea. We can sit on our surfboards and look out for the next wave, but I'm not seeing it this side of the horizon.

Originally Posted by B Butler

I still see September 11th and Bush 43's follow up wars as transforming. We went from accusations of "wag the dog", an unwillingness to commit to conflict for any reason, to serial preemptive war of choice. As soon as one of our conquests was sort of almost stable, we'd build bases to launch the next conquest. We then recognized the lessons learned, that the reality didn't match the neo con wet dream. We're willing to consider action carefully at this point, while being in no hurry at all to commit ground troops and acknowledging the costs in blood and gold. The Republicans and Democrats of the Bush 43 era weren't fighting a war in the Middle East. They were attempting to vindicate their very different spins on Vietnam. Now, instead of two conflicting value based knee jerk reactions to potential conflict, there is far better consensus that you avoid war if you can, but can't presume that the last war is behind us.

Bush 43 just was the unravelling president, like Coolidge and Hoover or Millard Fillmore. There was a diminution; no positive transformation at all. He was the worst president in our history. Sept. 11 was an attack that I predicted; it was the excuse for one poorly-waged war and another totally-unnecessary one, which was left for a few soldiers to fight and was not a society in total war. All turnings have wars; a war does not mean it was a 4T. We had a consensus develop in the 2T that America's Vietnam War was not necessary; that was the correct spin, not a knee-jerk reaction. But the resistance to this lesson still existed, in a divided country; and these reactionary neo-cons came into power again in 2001 and gave us this backward business-as-usual American imperialism, more-or-less identical to that pursued in Vietnam. The Awakening values of going beyond war have been challenged, and that challenge is to learn the lesson that we don't need to go to war as often as our imperialist masters wish.

We learned a lot, but seem reluctant to acknowledge this as it would in part acknowledge that the other side's values had considerable merit. I am very disappointed that people are not acknowledging the importance or degree of the values change. I fear we are pretending so hard that the values change never existed that we'll have to learn the same lessons again some day. Of course, you are still promoting the Love and Peace values of the 60s, and are apt to continue to do so, regardless of ongoing failed states, of economic collapse, organized rape and ongoing genocide. If you close your eyes you can avoid seeing these things. If one disregards reality there is no real need to act.

The failure, is the failure to observe the new values, in the case of Bush 43's wars. That some people take new values and reject old values in a too-extreme way, is natural, and so some people might not recognize that military action or support for others taking it may be needed at times-- probably rare. But what we have now in the Middle East has little to do with people taking our new peace values to an extreme. We failed to sufficiently support the rebels in Syria, and thus we see the civil war there continue and to destroy the region. If we have failed in the Obama years, THAT was the failure, and there was no other. Is that the failure of the new values, or just weariness of involvement in the Middle East after so many years of failure and death created by us in defense of the old pre-60s values? I think the latter. Poor governance leads to reaction away from those policies. And so Obama failed to support the Free Syrians at the appropriate time, and therefore the forces unleashed by our earlier failure under Bush 43 to support the new 60s values (the IS, Al Qaeda in Iraq) were able to take over and expand. These extremist forces exist in part in reaction to American imperialism, pursued by us in defiance of the new 60s values, as well as to ancient, destructive forces native to that region and not entirely our creation. In order to see where we are on the saeculum cycle, you need to see events correctly.

I anticipated that Bush 43's collapsed economy would trigger a second phase of the current crisis season, the economic half. As soon as Obama loaded his economic posts with Wall Street insiders, I knew it wouldn't happen on his watch. In some ways this is just as well. We put an (expletive deleted) band aid on a huge problem, and survived it without a total disaster. Alas, we needed the total disaster in order to have the motivation to cast down the whole system. With the notable exception of Elizabeth Warren, no one is preaching transformation. While a lot of people sympathize with her perspective, she isn't riding a tidal wave. There is no underlaying groundswell pushing her. There is no spiral of rhetoric building to overthrow the system.

The economic half generally comes first, historically. That is what has happened. A foreign policy phase does seem to be ramping up in at least two places, however, partly due to our own unravelling/Bush 43 policies. How bad it gets, or whether we enter total war because of it, remains to be seen. But our domestic crisis, consisting mainly of our national divide and gridlock, continues to ramp up as well, and will likely be the main ingredient in our 4T. Our period is not the 1940s or 1860s redux, but the previous decade to those. Revolutions did not happen in those periods either, although FDR was able to make transformations because the conditions were more severe and the country less-divided. Now, more like the 1850s, our country is more divided, and thus unable to make changes; while thanks to the previous transformation and experience, the economic crisis was less severe. But those lacking the cosmic perspective are naturally less able to see where we are, and many folks (including myself) are frustrated at the slow and inadequate pace of change. But the cosmic perspective affords me a view that has proven correct and will likely prove so in the future. Not seeing the longer view proposed by such folks as myself and Mr. Howe, some people here try to make the early 2000s the start of the Crisis. But that goes against the cyclic pattern. There's no reason to do that, and events do not justify this in the least, in any way.

I have long suspected the community at T4T is one of folks who perceive grave flaws and desire great changes. The notion of large transitions is attractive to dissatisfied revolutionaries. Whether we want your new age of 1960s wonder, Cynic's return to the militarism of the past, or whatever vision each of us holds in our mind, the status quo doesn't seem satisfactory. We are open to the suggestion that upheaval is natural to inevitable.

But to an awful lot of people, the status quo doesn't look all that bad. Were not seeing the equivalent energy to the massive unemployment that enabled the New Deal or the moral disaster that was slavery. Two of today's better positioned presidential candidates bear the Clinton and Bush names that are well seeped in unravelling values and policies. The Blue / Red divide is not rising towards a crescendo, but limping along as stagnant as ever.

Which is exactly as I predicted. Neptune in Pisces is not a condition astrologically that indicates decisive action. No-one should expect a crescendo in an era that is a redux of the early 1850s. We see procrastination instead, just like the days of Pierce and Buchanan. We should expect another one like that to be elected in 2016. But the Red/Blue divide IS getting worse. Our government is stalled and problems are festering. Frustration will continue to mount, and you can rely on my prediction that the dam will burst in the 2020s, at first in a steady flow and then a flood. You can take that prediction to the bank.

It is natural I suppose that T4Ters might be among those who see radical changes ahead, since this is what the book predicts. But the cycles and the evidence point to it. The idea that a 4T is at hand is well-founded in the cyclic movements of the generations. Of course, some people like the status quo. But most who do are the economic elite that likes getting all the benefits of society, while most people are barely getting by and are not happy at all with the status quo. They do need more like Elizabeth Warren to articulate the problems and defeat the deceivers who mute the frustration with free market ideology. Change now depends entirely on the people being able to see through this deception, and on our younger generations getting mobilized instead of remaining uncivic and unpolitical.

In some ways I hope I'm wrong, but the way things look we might well muddle in place until Global Warming becomes undeniable and the Green Awakening explodes. Even that might not happen if building batteries becomes profitable, if the path to a green future is well paved before the potential Generation Green finds their lungs.

Anyway, it isn't just you, Eric, there are a lot of us who look to our values as a compass pointing to the future. A lot of us think the future will be or must be a reflection of our personal values, that The Theory is a mechanism that justifies how our own personal ways of looking at things can and must triumph. I see the patterns S & H found in history as illustrating how major transformation can occur and finding a rhythm that applied well when changing technology demanded changing society. It is not clear the demand for change is still in place.

Prior crises required changes in government structure. Kings and dictators needed to be overthrown. Political power held concentrated by a hereditary landowning and military class had to be defused. Democracy and human rights were profound tools that needed to be advanced if problems like slavery and the Gilded Age's boom bust economies with extreme poverty were to be addressed.

At the moment, the downtrodden masses seem content eating cake and playing video games. I can admire your echoes of the zeal of the 1960s. I'm very fond of the transformations that took place in those times, myself. That's not the wave of the future though, now. That wave has hit the beach and rolled back out to sea. We can sit on our surfboards and look out for the next wave, but I'm not seeing it this side of the horizon.

It is crucial to recognize that there will be no Green or any next Awakening without a successful 4T Crisis. There were no Awakenings that transformed Rome in the 3rd century AD. Awakenings comes in societies that are moving forward. We need to go through the gateway and emerge on the other side. The predicted-by-me muddling around in the 2010s does not change this in the least; it is merely postponing the inevitable. I have my personal values of how things need to go, and this is based on a solid foundation of truth. However, my predictions for the next few decades are not solely based on this, but on an awareness of history and cycles and what's going on today. I don't know when the new age vision will be realized; that depends on the people, and it may take many decades or centuries or millennia. There's a chance that they could be moved forward in this century, but I am less certain of this than I once was. We largely missed our chance for a major new age renaissance in the 1990s, despite some echoes of the 1960s that occured then.

We have indeed an entrenched elite that needs to be overthrown, and I see it as as-fully severe as the entrenched powers of other times, and the situation is getting worse because of the failure of the opposition to it to vote. The wave for transformation is building. Surf is rising. A 4T is not exactly like a 2T, so a repeat of the 1960s is not in the cards; the changes in a 4T are more institutional and materialistic. But unless we go through them, our society will not succeed. A declining society cannot host the next Awakening.

Originally Posted by B Butler

I still see September 11th and Bush 43's follow up wars as transforming. We went from accusations of "wag the dog", an unwillingness to commit to conflict for any reason, to serial preemptive war of choice. As soon as one of our conquests was sort of almost stable, we'd build bases to launch the next conquest. We then recognized the lessons learned, that the reality didn't match the neo con wet dream. We're willing to consider action carefully at this point, while being in no hurry at all to commit ground troops and acknowledging the costs in blood and gold. The Republicans and Democrats of the Bush 43 era weren't fighting a war in the Middle East. They were attempting to vindicate their very different spins on Vietnam. Now, instead of two conflicting value based knee jerk reactions to potential conflict, there is far better consensus that you avoid war if you can, but can't presume that the last war is behind us.

Good points. Of course virtues and vices matter... and it is hard to see much virtue Dubya and Company had. Personal loyalty? Sure, but often to things of questionable value. T4T suggests that the transition from a Third Turning to a Fourth Turning is full of booby traps -- tempting blunders, like pretending that we are on the verge of a new and delightful world that requires little effort to achieve. Not many Americans could imagine Guadalcanal in 1928.

We learned a lot, but seem reluctant to acknowledge this as it would in part acknowledge that the other side's values had considerable merit. I am very disappointed that people are not acknowledging the importance or degree of the values change. I fear we are pretending so hard that the values change never existed that we'll have to learn the same lessons again some day. Of course, you are still promoting the Love and Peace values of the 60s, and are apt to continue to do so, regardless of ongoing failed states, of economic collapse, organized rape and ongoing genocide. If you close your eyes you can avoid seeing these things. If one disregards reality there is no real need to act.

The influence of the (Aquarian) Boom Awakening on mass culture is practically gone; it is now nostalgia. It's the "Sixties Channel" of oldies on satellite radio. The effects of the later, Fundamentalist/Evangelical Awakening are with us to this day. Like it or not, that is a legitimate phase of the Awakening Era. It has pushed 'family values', 'faith for the fake of faith', and 'pride in America' contrary to the values of urbane sophisticates who will never get it. Secular humanists can never accept Pascal's wager of living miserably for promises of rewards in Heaven, snicker at the idea of America operating by rules exempting it from the consequences that other countries must endure, and can't imagine giving up Beethoven to be truly American.

I can imagine a scenario in which Pascal's wager is forced upon us. Such would imply a nasty 4T in which America becomes a mindless, joyless place in which love is indistinguishable from the willingness to suffer without understanding why. We can still have an economic meltdown as severe and protracted as that of 1929-1932 that leads to the dissolution of liberal reforms from the Progressive Era onward. America would have a huge brain drain; people whose identity with America is shaky due to non-American origin might decide to leave.

I anticipated that Bush 43's collapsed economy would trigger a second phase of the current crisis season, the economic half. As soon as Obama loaded his economic posts with Wall Street insiders, I knew it wouldn't happen on his watch. In some ways this is just as well. We put an (expletive deleted) band aid on a huge problem, and survived it without a total disaster. Alas, we needed the total disaster in order to have the motivation to cast down the whole system. With the notable exception of Elizabeth Warren, no one is preaching transformation. While a lot of people sympathize with her perspective, she isn't riding a tidal wave. There is no underlying groundswell pushing her. There is no spiral of rhetoric building to overthrow the system.

Before Dubya I thought that we might have a mild 4T, one in which the greatest dangers are smoothed out but major reforms deferred from the Awakening and the Culture Wars would be established. Damaged institutions would get new life out of manifest necessity. The public mood would change as the Civic component of public life went from elderly GIs still wielding some political and cultural influence to young Millennial adults in the workplace. If someone did something stupid overseas, then America would respond to such stupidity. I never expected a bubble economy and I never expected the President to lie to get a war for profit and his own glory-seeking. This will not be a mild 4T.

I have long suspected the community at T4T is one of folks who perceive grave flaws and desire great changes. The notion of large transitions is attractive to dissatisfied revolutionaries. Whether we want your new age of 1960s wonder, Cynic's return to the militarism of the past, or whatever vision each of us holds in our mind, the status quo doesn't seem satisfactory. We are open to the suggestion that upheaval is natural to inevitable.

Indeed -- but the Generational Theory has its Dark Side, too, as shown in Germany 80 years ago. The Germans never saw the Dark Side coming until it was too late to reverse or resist it. We can see our democracy transformed into something new -- and ugly. America can become the Evil Empire that the rest of the world dreads, and the sort of place that many here will flee.

But to an awful lot of people, the status quo doesn't look all that bad. Were not seeing the equivalent energy to the massive unemployment that enabled the New Deal or the moral disaster that was slavery. Two of today's better positioned presidential candidates bear the Clinton and Bush names that are well seeped in unravelling values and policies. The Blue / Red divide is not rising towards a crescendo, but limping along as stagnant as ever.

The status quo is rot. Rot requires aggressive treatment lest it undermine something precious.

In some ways I hope I'm wrong, but the way things look we might well muddle in place until Global Warming becomes undeniable and the Green Awakening explodes. Even that might not happen if building batteries becomes profitable, if the path to a green future is well paved before the potential Generation Green finds their lungs.

The entities that deny global warming because measures necessary to reverse it or prevent worse are going to change their minds once they recognize a rise in the sea level, crop failures, and economic dislocations to their detriment. We may see economic elites divide on it as owners of urban real estate and energy producers could be on opposites sides of the debate.

If we go with the current pattern, it is too little too late. Big Business now seems intent more on squeezing workers harder, monopolizing markets, privatizing anything profitable, and even starting profitable wars than on solving anything that is everyone's problem.

...(Many) us who look to our values as a compass pointing to the future. A lot of us think the future will be or must be a reflection of our personal values, that The Theory is a mechanism that justifies how our own personal ways of looking at things can and must triumph. I see the patterns S & H found in history as illustrating how major transformation can occur and finding a rhythm that applied well when changing technology demanded changing society. It is not clear the demand for change is still in place.

The values of any one of us means little now. Economic reality may become nothing more than relation of power and helplessness. If we are willing to discount the values of someone who believes that Biblical literalism trumps science, that abortion is a Holocaust, that low-brow culture is better than pretentious stuff that only 'depraved cosmopolitan types' can enjoy, and that the world is largely a test to see who suffers enough on behalf of powerful people elect of God to deserve something other than Hell... just imagine what people who believe such stuff think of us.

Prior crises required changes in government structure. Kings and dictators needed to be overthrown. Political power held concentrated by a hereditary landowning and military class had to be defused. Democracy and human rights were profound tools that needed to be advanced if problems like slavery and the Gilded Age's boom bust economies with extreme poverty were to be addressed.

Some people believe the Great Society, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, and even the Enlightenment (of which the American Revolution is a consequence) must be undone. Eternity matters far more than This World... that is the medieval mind at work.

At the moment, the downtrodden masses seem content eating cake and playing video games. I can admire ... echoes of the zeal of the 1960s. I'm very fond of the transformations that took place in those times, myself. That's not the wave of the future though, now. That wave has hit the beach and rolled back out to sea. We can sit on our surfboards and look out for the next wave, but I'm not seeing it this side of the horizon.

The Boom Awakening is over. There will not be another Awakening Era until at the least 2030 (which implies that this Crisis Era culminates very soon and the following High is short -- and perhaps 2040, most likely. We could all have other things as concerns before we start looking inward and seeking euphoria. We could be wandering about wreckage that resembles Warsaw or Nagasaki in 1945, trying to imagine how we put the material world back together so that we can survive. We could find our infrastructure and the distribution networks that we take for granted gone or at least disrupted. Let something like "only Restorationism" be the solution for temporary problems, and we can end up with even bigger problems.

We Americans messed up badly by electing George W. Bush in 2000... and then after getting a near-antithesis, asked for more of the same in the Tea Party. We are terribly unwise.

Originally Posted by B Butler

I still see September 11th and Bush 43's follow up wars as transforming. We went from accusations of "wag the dog", an unwillingness to commit to conflict for any reason, to serial preemptive war of choice. As soon as one of our conquests was sort of almost stable, we'd build bases to launch the next conquest. We then recognized the lessons learned, that the reality didn't match the neo con wet dream. We're willing to consider action carefully at this point, while being in no hurry at all to commit ground troops and acknowledging the costs in blood and gold. The Republicans and Democrats of the Bush 43 era weren't fighting a war in the Middle East. They were attempting to vindicate their very different spins on Vietnam. Now, instead of two conflicting value based knee jerk reactions to potential conflict, there is far better consensus that you avoid war if you can, but can't presume that the last war is behind us.

We learned a lot, but seem reluctant to acknowledge this as it would in part acknowledge that the other side's values had considerable merit. I am very disappointed that people are not acknowledging the importance or degree of the values change. I fear we are pretending so hard that the values change never existed that we'll have to learn the same lessons again some day. Of course, you are still promoting the Love and Peace values of the 60s, and are apt to continue to do so, regardless of ongoing failed states, of economic collapse, organized rape and ongoing genocide. If you close your eyes you can avoid seeing these things. If one disregards reality there is no real need to act.

I anticipated that Bush 43's collapsed economy would trigger a second phase of the current crisis season, the economic half. As soon as Obama loaded his economic posts with Wall Street insiders, I knew it wouldn't happen on his watch. In some ways this is just as well. We put an (expletive deleted) band aid on a huge problem, and survived it without a total disaster. Alas, we needed the total disaster in order to have the motivation to cast down the whole system. With the notable exception of Elizabeth Warren, no one is preaching transformation. While a lot of people sympathize with her perspective, she isn't riding a tidal wave. There is no underlaying groundswell pushing her. There is no spiral of rhetoric building to overthrow the system.

I have long suspected the community at T4T is one of folks who perceive grave flaws and desire great changes. The notion of large transitions is attractive to dissatisfied revolutionaries. Whether we want your new age of 1960s wonder, Cynic's return to the militarism of the past, or whatever vision each of us holds in our mind, the status quo doesn't seem satisfactory. We are open to the suggestion that upheaval is natural to inevitable.

But to an awful lot of people, the status quo doesn't look all that bad. Were not seeing the equivalent energy to the massive unemployment that enabled the New Deal or the moral disaster that was slavery. Two of today's better positioned presidential candidates bear the Clinton and Bush names that are well seeped in unravelling values and policies. The Blue / Red divide is not rising towards a crescendo, but limping along as stagnant as ever.

In some ways I hope I'm wrong, but the way things look we might well muddle in place until Global Warming becomes undeniable and the Green Awakening explodes. Even that might not happen if building batteries becomes profitable, if the path to a green future is well paved before the potential Generation Green finds their lungs.

Anyway, it isn't just you, Eric, there are a lot of us who look to our values as a compass pointing to the future. A lot of us think the future will be or must be a reflection of our personal values, that The Theory is a mechanism that justifies how our own personal ways of looking at things can and must triumph. I see the patterns S & H found in history as illustrating how major transformation can occur and finding a rhythm that applied well when changing technology demanded changing society. It is not clear the demand for change is still in place.

Prior crises required changes in government structure. Kings and dictators needed to be overthrown. Political power held concentrated by a hereditary landowning and military class had to be defused. Democracy and human rights were profound tools that needed to be advanced if problems like slavery and the Gilded Age's boom bust economies with extreme poverty were to be addressed.

At the moment, the downtrodden masses seem content eating cake and playing video games. I can admire your echoes of the zeal of the 1960s. I'm very fond of the transformations that took place in those times, myself. That's not the wave of the future though, now. That wave has hit the beach and rolled back out to sea. We can sit on our surfboards and look out for the next wave, but I'm not seeing it this side of the horizon.

I feel the same. We had a window, but the leaders we needed to pull us into the frame were either otherwise engaged or duplicitous. So here we are. Things are only kinda-sorta bad, so we're only kinda-sorta mad. The electronic circus is in full bloom, with the Millennials so engaged with their technology-induced virtual life that they have a hard time missing the real one they are kinda-sorta living. It's even possible that they could live and die without really exiting their cocoons, all else being equal.

But of course, all else is not equal. The climate will change, regardless of its status on Twitter or the number of followers it has on Facebook. Even Instagram won't be able to apply enough beautiful sunsets to make it go dormant. The economy isn't killing them either, so this next confrontation may be on several fronts. Good. Sorry I'll miss it though.