Pick Your Crisis

Here at the end of January, there is no end to the available Crisis stories:

• Russia has its ongoing economic Crisis
• Ukraine has its ongoing Russian Crisis
• Greece has initiated a Crisis for the European Union by electing a "radical left" party with a platform of not continuing with austerity measures originally intended to rebuild the economy.  And this is not intended as a smear: SYRIZA contains former elements of the Greek Communist Party,along with other parties like International Workers that appear communist in all but name, while using red as a main color in their presentations and rallies, so it shouldn't be controversial to say that they really are Communists. 
  
• As far as oil producers are concerned, the steep drop continues to be a Crisis, as well.
• Japan has a hostage crisis, too.

Hardly have to look up anything else. Although there is an anti-Keurig campaign that's done a promotional video based on Cloverfield.

The New Millennial Film Era is Almost Here...Again

We are due for the start of a new era of film, one with a Millennial flavor.

A recent Los Angeles times summary of Sundance suggests that the time is almost here. Even if most of the folks mentioned are Xers, still - like last time, when the talk was all about danger.

Which is to say, it's - still, like last time - almost here.

Still, the article specifically mentions moving away from Boomer stories. Not in the expected direction, necessarily: The most striking images are of Silents, such as Chuck Norris (b. 1940),  Evel Knievel (b. 1938), and Stanley Milgram (b. 1933) - who I initially confused with a different famous experiment run by someone born in the same year. Although there are a few Xers and even Millennials as subjects in some cases. The new era is on its way.

The N-1 and the Failure of the Chief Designer

Was the failure of the N-1 the Soviet Union's equivalent of the Challenger Disaster?

There's a lot to draw together here, so pay attention...

In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded soon after liftoff. It was later determined to be due to hot gases leaking from the solid-fuel boosters due to the failure of an O-ring. This failure was due to an unexpected sensitivity to cold that prevented a proper seal. Then-current administrative culture at NASA also made it difficult to recommend aborting the mission, even though there was evidence of the danger.

...Which made it similar to another disaster 64 years earlier, when the crew of the mighty Titanic ignored warnings and continued at high speed into an area where icebergs had already been seen. Walter Lord, writer of the seminal Titanic history A Night to Remember, specifically pointed out the similarities in the two disasters. Both were considered wake-up calls about the limits of technology and the risks of hubris.

Titanic and Challenger happened near the start of their respective Third Turnings, and might even be considered THE starting point of each. If it is common for this lesson of hubris to be learned at this time, we should expect to see it happening in other Third Turnings for other cultures - and the N-1 might be an example of that.

There are some definite problems with this interpretation.  The N-1 failed in 1969, which would have to be more near the end of the USSRs Third Turning. In addition, the news was not widespread until the fall of the Soviet Union over twenty years later - which would prevent it from having a cultural impact.

Except that such a large effort had to have had a large number of workers who all would have known or guessed what happened. And even if the fate of the N-1 was unknown, that the Soviet Union had fallen behind in the space race, despite having a massive lead at the start, must have had some impact on the people of the USSR.

Oh What The Heck - Today in ....

Apocalypse: X-Men, again - without Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellen, though. Sigh.

Cloverfield: American Sniper beat its January opening.

Crisis: Some concern over a new European currency crisis. And the Russian economy, too, of course.

Collapse: I-75 overpass collapse. And, well, yeah, the Packers.

Brunelleschi and the Duomo

"Brunelleschi". On the street next to the church he helped complete, literally looking up at the dome.
 Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

There's a NOVA episode about the Florence Cathedral, Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. It's also known as the Duomo, because of its massive dome,  designed by Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 1400s. The importance of the architect to the building is repeated (as he is named) successively, which suggest that it's a Third Turning event - that is, during period when people stand out compared to organizations.

Is it correct? Unfortunately, the dates of designing and building the dome cover such a wide period that it would depend entirely on which of them were chosen. Plus, the timing of the 15th Century Saeculum in Italy isn't easily found, so it could be gamed that way.  Although if 1492 is accepted as its end throughout Europe, it would make sense that the Fourth was roughly 1470-1492 and the Third 1448-1470.

Significant dates include:

• 1294: Cathedral design, including a requirement for a massive dome,  is approved by the Florence city fathers
• 1296: First stone is laid down.
• 1377: Brunelleschi is born.
• 1380: Nave is complete.
• 1401: Competition for new doors for the Baptistry. Ghiberti is victorious over the other competitors, including Brunelleschi.
• 1418: Cathedral is complete...except for the dome. Competition is held to find an architect to build it.Ghiberti and Brunelleschi are the main competitors: Brunelleschi wins.
• 1420: Work begins on the dome.
• 1436: The dome is completed.
• 1446: Brunelleschi dies.

By the earlier date range, the dome's building must be solidly in the Second Turning. If we wanted to infer the Saeculum based on the other events here, we could say that 1294 is clearly a First, with a major infrastructure build being approved and initiated. It seems likely that 1401 is also a First, being just more than a century later (one full Saeculum, that is), and with another government-sponsored infrastructure event. If that's the beginning of the First, furthermore, it lines up well with the earlier estimate of the Saeculum dates. (And implies that 1380-1400 was a Crisis period. If so, its start would line up with the Revolt of the Ciompi, short-lived though it was.)

It doesn't appear, that is, that he's known because it's a Third Turning.

Hamlet at Wittenberg

Hamlet wants to return to Wittenberg. It's one of the first things he says to anyone else. Called home to Denmark by the untimely death of his father, and with the crowning of Claudius giving him no reason to stay, he quite reasonably is ready to leave. It probably doesn't help that his girlfriend has unexpectedly stopped talking to him. (It's tempting to call Ophelia his "hometown girlfriend," but then again he probably isn't a girl-in-every-port kind of guy.) Nothing better to do than go back to school.

But why is he at Wittenberg? Why in particular did Shakespeare choose this place as the school Hamlet attends?

To start, of course, he doesn't belong there. The university had opened just barely 100 years before Shakespeare was writing, while the events in Hamlet belong several hundred years earlier. It had only been open for a few years, in fact, when Luther used it as a launchpad for his complaints about the church. Shakespeare appears to be using this history as a way to say something more about Hamlet himself and the play.

One proposal is that Shakespeare is saying something about the Reformation. There's a lot to say in 1602, and a lot to want to be quiet about. If one was a fiercely proud Protestant, one could speak out against a corrupt (and Catholic) king.  If one was a crypto-Catholic - a possibility that can be surmised based on the will that Shakespeare's father left -  one might want to subtly allude to the dangers of paying attention to someone from Wittenberg.

Another possibility is an attempt to be witty about the then-current advances in astronomy. Tycho Brahe also studied at Wittenberg, and his careful observations enabled the further advances of Kepler and Galileo - all contemporaries of Shakespeare. There are multiple astronomical allusions throughout the play, such as "that star closest to the pole."

We could infer that Wittenberg meant something to Shakespeare and his audience - if Hamlet is from there, he is some particular kind of person or has some particular attributes. Looking at it from a generational perspective, we could expect that Wittenberg had acquired a reputation similar to that of other college towns at the center of Awakening (Second Turning). That is, it was seen similar to how modern Americans might see Madison, Wisconsin or UC Berkeley, which were closely associated with the changes happening in the 1960s.  In this interpretation, Hamlet isn't a sympathetic character, but a too-cerebral elitist who makes moral pronouncements that nobody else accepts.

Today in Crisis and Cloverfield

Seems calmer today, somehow.

From the Wall Street Journal: Qatar helps Venezuela weather oil Crisis.

An editorial from the Los Angeles Times concerning a housing crisis.

The health care crisis in England is still generating some heat. (A&E is Accident and Emergency, so similar to concerns about overburdened emergency rooms in the United States.)

A euro crisis in Greece, a ruble crisis in Russia.


Cloverfield actually shows up a couple of times because the movie was released in January, and its opening numbers are compared with current releases.

Anonymous vs. the Attackers of Charlie Hebdo

A few years ago the Anonymous hackers collective announced it would be taking on the notorious Zetas cartel in Mexico. A member had been kidnapped, and in response dissemination of information about the criminal organization was planned for release. This did lead to the Zetas letting the kidnap victim go, but the Zetas promised retribution if there was a release, said retribution aimed at the victim's family.  Others simply considered Anonymous as overreaching and risking violent bloody death for something that would make no difference at all to the Zetas.

With this as background, the possibility that Anonymous might really do something about Islamic State or Al-Qaeda seems similarly ill-conceived. On further reflection, though, it might be a better match than initially perceived. While this might not be anything like the organizational analysis that might truly be needed, it goes to the differences between

• A state organization, i.e. a government, with defensive and offensive capabilities aimed at protection of the members of the state and pursuit of their common goals.
• A criminal organization based on a profit motive.
• A terrorist organization with ideological goals (which may be based on religious thought)
• Whatever organizational type one might assign to Anonymous, although their goals are ultimately ideological in scope.

To start, though, there's an important distinction already: The Zetas had an exploitable connection to Anonymous, namely the previously kidnapped member. Conversely, the reason Anonymous considered taking action was because of the kidnapping. This naturally weakens the anonymity that the group depends on. It would be like Batman starting his crime-fighting career by saying he was avenging the Waynes: It's too much of a clue to toss out there at the start. If, instead, information had appeared in public places with only a Guy Fawkes mask to show where it came from - and no connection to anyone - it might have been an effective method to weaken the cartel.

Although at least one commentator noted that the government is completely owned by the cartel, so releasing the info would do nothing helpful at all. Open source intelligence group Stratfor finishes their assessment with

Being identified and detained by Scotland Yard or the FBI is a far different situation than being identified and detained by Los Zetas.

In any case, without a focused assault on key nodes of infrastructure, you can't hope to eliminate all of them - and it only takes the attention of a few organized criminals to have the attention of them all. That is an advantage of having a hierarchical organization with well-defined and concrete goals: Someone starts messing around, all resources can be focused in that direction, and the only justification needed to do so is "are our goals in jeopardy." Anonymous depends on people using their computers to support the operations they want to support. They would not be able to apply sufficient force to the Zetas, because the methods of attack are too diffuse to affect the cartel's concrete goals of making money and acquiring power. While there is an advantage to anonymity, it's not clear that it makes any difference to this inherent imbalance.

But attacking Al-Qaeda in this way might work. Al-Qaeda has a de-centralized structure as well,  and could be said to lack key nodes - a successful attack on one node will normally have no effect on the overall organization. Any impact requires eliminating enough individual notes to degrade communication, operational effectiveness, etc.  Which means the winner will be the side that can eliminate nodes more effectively, by having more people and/or better skills. That could be Anonymous.

("Hey - Al-Qaeda has used diffuse tactics against the United States successfully!" Yes, but not against concrete goals of the United States.  "Money and power" can be broken down specifically for a criminal organization, since the goals are related directly to its leaders, who aren't responsible to anyone else. Any criminal organization will have to have particular areas it controls and areas it wants to enter.  This doesn't scale up to a state with millions of citizens, many of whom have differing opinions on what the purpose of government should be.)

The question would be relative advantage and alignment of purpose with ideology: Will there be more people attacking jihadist websites or defending them?  Will the defenders be more or less skillful than the attackers? Given equivalent forces, is the advantage to the defenders advantage or the attackers? (Probably the former - keep the site up, you win.) Who does anonymity help more, here? While hard to tell for sure, it seems like this would be a win for the attackers - that more people would align themselves to that side than the other.

Moses, Moses, Moses!

In their book Generations, in Appendix A, Strauss & Howe take a look a the story related in Exodus to show that the generational cycle had been around for a while. Moses  - a literal Prophet - is protected by his mother and takes on the powers that be; Joshua enters Canaan and leads a war against the local residents to take over the land.  This interpretation, though, requires looking at what happened in a different way than many people learn. Moses is not fighting to keep the Hebrew slaves alive in the face of Pharoah's cruelty, he is doing what he can to get them tossed out. Passover and the Exodus are not outward-facing Crisis events,  but inward focused Awakening.

It's a different way to look at the books in the Bible, not as a people young and old scrambling to escape, but as young and old departing on a gorgeous day, ready to take on anything for the glory of God.

Melting down the .... whatever

Hackers attacked a German steel mill. After getting network access in what sounds like standard ways, they used it to acquire control of the blast furnace. Hilarity ensued.

(In some network-based fields "melting down the database" can be used to refer to major issues that are impacting its usability. This is rather worse, of course.)

Although this isn't really a Data Wars item - it's more standard cyber-warfare, attacking infrastructure by taking advantage of our connected world. It's still impressive and a reminder of what the future world will look like. At least until it settles down and achieves a more steady state.

The Attack on Charlie Hebdo

Twelve were killed at a French satirical newspaper called Charlie Hebdo.  It was targeted by Islamic terrorists, because the staff published caricatures of Mohammed.

While this was far from the most deadly terrorist attack, it may turn out to be one of the most significant. Although the attack is much different from the Sony hack, it's inspiring a similar response: People aren't standing for it.

John Minchillo / Associated Press

As a society, we are not willing to die for freedom of speech - yet - but we are becoming very concerned about infringement on freedoms. Theaters not willing to show The Interview led to Sony Pictures pulling the film from distribution, which led to people objecting to it, which led to it being released anyway. And now this attack has led many more people to Charlie Hebdo's site, to what they do - to the very images which the attackers opposed.

This is also known as the Streisand Effect: Barbra objected to a picture of her house being included in a web-based survey of the California coastline. She threatened to sue, not wanting everyone in the world to know exactly what her house looked like. Unfortunately, this led to the lawsuit being published in newspapers, which led people to the survey, which led to many more people gaining access to this information. Sony says it won't show a movie, so everyone demands it be shown. And an obscure French satire site displaying pictures that nobody would really have cared about, is now getting . And those caricatures? Available all over the Internet, and soon to be on t-shirts.

The question comes up sometimes: How can the coddled, protected Heroes become the saviors of civilization? They've never known suffering, they don't have inherent moral strength, they never had to be strong and tough....but they do know what they have, and they trust in their friends, and they know their friends have their backs, too.  Millennials who have been able to express themselves - pamphleteers of everything they think or act or do - appear to take this seriously, perhaps enough to war against it. The war may be starting already.

Today in Apocalypse

Still lurking about?

Last time I searched the news for Apocalypse, all that showed up was a new X-Men movie. It still shows up - but not at the top of the list.

Today, "Apocalypse" gets you footage of the legendary CNN video planned for the end of the world.




Seems like cheating a bit, doesn't it?

Gremlins 2 has a bit of fun with this as well: The Turner-esque head ("Casablanca! Now in color! And with a happier ending!") of Clamp Cable Network has a similar video, which seems appropriate for the threatened gremlin invasion.

Because of the end of civilization, the Clamp Cable Network now leaves the air. We hope you've enjoyed our programming, but more importantly, we hope you've enjoyed... life.

Chapel

It is a perhaps deluded expectation that art can reveal the Turning in which it was produced.

At the risk of confirmation bias here is one example that worked :



This is the United States Air Force Academy Chapel.  For a place of worship, this is really quite radical architecture. For one at a service academy - what could be expected as a conservative bastion - even more so.

On second view, though, it is also aspirational, pointing to the heavens and looking to the future. Perhaps it is more a product of an age when anything is possible.

And from that came the conclusion that it is First Turning, but late enough for the radical design to be accepted. (Note for comparison that the barracks are very functional and limited in appeal ... although they also can be seen as a version of mid-century modern.)

The answer, as it turns out, is that the Air Force Academy Chapel was completed in 1962 - near the end of the American High (First Turning), just before the start of the Consciousness Revolution (Second Turning).

Privateers of the Data Wars

How My Mom Got Hacked is a description of an attack using Crypto Wall, a type of malware that encrypts your files then demands a ransom to decrypt them.

It's another possible way a Data Wars scenario could play out. Encourage a bunch of your guys to set up offensive operations like this and...well, that's really about it. Privateers didn't need to pay back their letters of marque; those were a help to their issuing government simply by decreasing enemy resources. (That it carried a negligible cost to that government was another advantage.)

Evidently there was a requirement for privateers to treat those captured "courteously and kindly." For reasons straightforward, and not necessarily altruistic,  this is followed by the folks behind this aforementioned hack, too - when the payment was made just a little too late for reasons outside of Mom's control, the ransomers accepted it anyway, upon explanation.

1776: Adam Smith

"Nothing important happened today."

Purported diary entry of King George III on July 4, 1776 

The year 1776 has at least two important events: The Declaration of Independence of the American Colonies, and the publishing of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

Note that one event refers to governments, organizations, while the other refers to a single person by name. Adam Smith is synonymous with capitalism and classical economics, where an "invisible hand" hidden within markets causes supply to handle demand and demand to regulate supply.  For the Declaration, Jefferson is known for drafting it, Hancock for his signature, Franklin for being, uh, himself...but mostly it's thought of as "what the Founding Fathers did." And that's likely because its impact goes beyond what was written - not just ideological ("we're independent because we can be")  but also military tactics ("so we're all-in on this war because we're going to be executed for treason if we lose") and diplomatic ("we are accepting help from any nation who wants to support freedom ... or annoy Great Britain.") Even if the writing was mostly one person, the implementation involved anyone involved in the American Revolution.

Which is a way of suggesting that in 1776, Britain was still in its Third Turning, while the United States was in its Fourth. This seems to correlate with the 1783 speech in Highlander, where historical figures are named with regard to Austria (Mozart) and France (the Montgolfier brothers), suggesting they are in a Third Turning. Meanwhile the United States as a group is referred to concerning the recognition of independence - a Fourth Turning indicator.

This could help to show that Europe and Britain and the Colonies had been drifting out of sync with each other for some time. The Colonies entered their Fourth Turning by 1773, while Britain (still in a Third) might have been unable to focus resources until they were too late to be of help.

Today in Crisis

Russia's financial crisis continues although the Russians are taking it in stride.

The UK's National Health Service in crisis ahead of what is expected to be a rough winter.

A review of a book on the coming retirement crisis (with a bonus "apocalypse" as well).

Greece in a political crisis  - or financial - or maybe both.

The Ebola crisis should be over in 2015. Or could be, anyway.

More variety in Crisis than has shown up recently.

Collapse isn't showing much, although there's a nice satire of what people are thinking on Forbes. And a surprising number of references to the Cotton Bowl. And a parcel delivery service called City Link, which is down for the count.

Nothing new for Cloverfield, incidentally.

Finishing the Grid

With a flurry of activity over the last week, I was able to finish up The Grid - which is to say, a system of dates and memorable events that enable context for most of the last 500 years of history. An additional advantage is being able to recreate it easily once the rules are known: Start from a known 4T/Crisis date, move along at about 100-year intervals to find previous and following crises; halfway between those dates you'll find 2T/Awakening events; and then split the remaining intervals to get 1T/High and 3T/Unraveling events.

This last burst was to finish up the Third Turning, which ended up mostly about technological advancement. Not too surprising, since its a way that individuals can distinguish themselves enough to be personally known. 

(It might be the case that Third Turning politicians also are well-known enough - we know Clinton and Bush; Coolidge and Hoover...the notion falls down before the Civil War, though.)

In any case, the final entries were

1752 - Benjamin Franklin experiments with electricity

1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin

1927 - Lindbergh flies solo from New York to Paris

1990 - Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web

The largest gaps left now are about - well, the largest one is between 1629 and 1666, 37 years. The 3T items ended up being close to the 4T events, making them often distant from the 2T ones. Still, the distance between any potential event in these last 522 years is roughly 20 years. Which makes it possible to identify other events by their distance from one of these, and be generally within a couple of decades of a known item in the Grid.

Which is, hopefully useful, if only by allowing one to be aware of the larger flow of history while looking at specific happenings.