Parallels

Back to Predictions for a moment, and the concept of parallels in other Saeculums - how, really, should parallels be counted? It’s easy to match any single event with another single event 80 years later, but that doesn’t prove much. It’s difficult to do so with even two events across time, and aligning three is a matter of interpretation more than analysis. What good does it do, then, to assert that “9/11 was the Lusitania of our age,” if you can’t make the 2008 financial crisis line up with 1929 stock market crash?

The necessary conclusion, then, is that you can’t depend on these parallels for predictive purposes, at least not in any precise way. In temporal comparisons you MIGHT be able to suggest that a deadly incident will precede the outbreak of major hostilities by 20 years, plus or minus 8. The causal relationships will be weaker still: Even if you can say that the Deadly Incident “caused” the bank crash - and most of the time you can’t - the usefulness of that “cause” in identifying future “causes” will get confounded by the possibility that the next parallel might not involve a bank at all.   

There’s probably a place for statistical analysis when looking into Turnings. It probably will require looking intensively at the last 600 years - enough time to get a proper statistical size going. And there will probably be some false starts, either from critics who won’t identify the important events  or from proponents who will infect the data with their own points of view. It seems like the next big step in this direction will need to be some effective categorization of the days and years going back to 1400 or thereabouts.