Since I did meet Neil Howe once and had an interesting discussion about the Fourth Turning with him in 2012, we have corresponded periodically over the years. I send him links to my Fourth Turning articles to see his reaction. Below is his email back to me regarding my latest two part article:
Jim:
Nice couple pieces. Overall, I agree with your prognoses. North Korea obviously remains at the top of geopolitical threats. The generals around Trump clearly fear not making a move now could ensure nuclear war just down the road. (A nuke going off anywhere in the world would totally change the social mood overnight, with house to house searches regardless of civil liberty guarantees.) On the economy, rising interest rates after rising inflation rates after full employment is reached (we may be just about there when you look at employment/population ratios by age) is the main threat.
Why would there be house to house searches if a nuke goes off someplace in the world?
Just because they can?
But I tell ya, the more events keep accelerating, the more convinced I become that this fourth turning is going to be a doozy, and that makes me quite sad for my children and grand childrens future.
I definitely hears dat!
Absolutely because they can! That is also why they wont actually take out North Korea. They want that sword of damocles hanging around so they can let it drop at precisely the moment it serves them. After demographic winter arrives, and dems control all 3 branches of government, then they might be tempted to let the sword fall in the form of a mushroom cloud. Whether or not it actually came from N Korea wont really matter nor will it be discussed. We will be too busy dealing with the fallout from door to door gun confiscation attempts.
(A nuke going off anywhere in the world would totally change the social mood overnight, with house to house searches regardless of civil liberty guarantees.)
If it were a ROGUE nuke, without government sanction, I believe this is true. Under the guise of finding and destroying any nuke suitcase holding “cells” in the country where it was detonated and, eventually, worldwide if sufficient numbers of threats were found to justify further searches beyond our borders, the CIA and a handful of other secret investigative teams (all incompetent like those seeking Bin Laden) would invade and violate the sovereignty of any nation or individual on the planet. Because the STATE must secure its survival in spite of the people. Not for the people. In spite of.
Nuclear weapons are way too difficult to make for any clandestine organization to pull it off.
You don’t just go out and buy weapons grade nuclear fuel and put one together in your garage.
And you certainly don’t produce weapons grade material without it going noticed by anyone and everyone around.
If you managed to somehow steal one, the know how to make it go boom is unlikely to be found outside of very specialized trained technical people who are not going to be available to you to do it.
If a nuke gets used somewhere, it will be done by a government with an advanced weapons program and that government will be known to have done it.
But, like 9-11, it could be MADE to look as if a relatively small unknown clandestine group pulled that off.
Maybe, but that would be really hard to do with a nuke.
There is an identifiable and public signature involved in nuclear materials and nukes themselves that make identification almost certain by both government and private sources worldwide.
A dirty bomb made from radioactive waste or medical materials would be a very different situation than an actual nuclear bomb, and would be the more likely terrorist style nuclear attack IMO. I could say time will tell, but I’m hoping it won’t.
You are forgetting things in your analysis I dont want to mention as I dont need a ‘visit’. And are you forgetting that genious kid who built a reactor in his garage? And did you ever catch the Vice special on warhead procurement? They got close enough to see an old unaccounted for warhead. Never assume your nightmares cant find a way to come true.
I bet with the breakup of the Soviet Union at the end/pause of the Cold War, there might be a few unaccounted for nukes around. I heard of a guy buying some forbidden piece of artillery at an estate sale somewhere not long ago. Feds seized it, I think.
I pulled this quote out of the linked post to bring to THIS post five years later (2012) and thought about the comment by Neil Howe regarding the state of the nation around this time after Obama had taken office. What was it that people saw in Obama that suggested he would do anything other than what he DID? I knew from the get-go that he was going to move into the commander’s office, play golf every day, let the underlings set policy and pretend to be the Boss. That’s what THEY do after an affirmative action promotion.
“Neil lamented what a great opportunity was missed in early 2009 by Barack Obama. The situation in the country was awful. He had both Houses in Congress. His popularity was at its peak. He could have done anything. The country could have accepted short term pain and began to fix our structural problems. He could have had an orderly liquidation of the Wall Street banks. He could have combined short term stimulus with a long term fix for our entitlement programs. But instead he rolled over for Wall Street and dished out Keynesian pork to his supporters. A once in a lifetime chance was missed.”
What made people think he ever intended anything other than rolling over for Wall Street? To the victor goes the spoils.
Irish Spring made some folks stinky. I preferred Coast.
And, yeah… the crosstalk is hilarious.
“after full employment is reached (we may be just about there)” WHAT? How are people working two or three part time/minimum wage/benefit-less/ shit jobs considered to be ‘full employment’?
Hedonics.
Hedonics basically says that once you find an acceptable substitute for something……two shitty jobs as opposed to one good one or dog food instead of ground beef then unemployment has been reduced or (food) inflation does not exist. It’s just doublespeak that allow the lies to continue. Yay!!!
Some dickhead actually got a fucking Nobel Prize for dreaming up Hedonics.
Have another serving of Hedonics and slave on!