With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Cliology

The Long View 2004-03-29: Unexpected Storms

Richard Clarke comes in again for more aspersions from John. I'm not Clarke deserved this, but I suppose it doesn't matter much now, even though it would seem that Clarke was probably more in the right. Of vastly more interest [to me] is John's

LinkFest 2016-03-26

Holy Saturday Edition Ruby Slippers Gabriel Rossman makes a persuasive case that social construction is real, but the concept is mostly used by people who don't understand it, and have no sense of proportion. How Does America "Reshore" Skills that have Disappeared? The first couple of

The Long View 2003-07-01: The Crisis Builds

In his book review on William Strauss and Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning, John noted that the generational model of that book predicted a crisis in America in about 2005 that would usher in two decades of chaos. We certainly seem to have gotten the chaos. Strauss and

The Long View: Spengler's Future

When I did the site upgrade, John's online book, Spengler's Future, got jumbled up because I had it hosted on separate pages. I rolled everything up into one page, and added it to the navigation bar. Spengler's Future was an interesting exercise, a book

The Long View: Spengler's Future

John wrote this book in 1992, based on the output of a program he wrote in BASIC to simulate repeated cycles of history. It is based on the work of both Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. John had a good sense of humor about the enterprise; he always took himself

The Long View: Millennials Rising

Strauss and Howe took a slightly different approach in this book from their previous works. This book focuses on one generation, the Millennials, born after 1982. This book in particular gives us an opportunity to revist Strauss and Howe's predictions nearly 15 years later. Pew Research has a

The Long View: The Fourth Turning

There was something magical and terrible about the end of the nineteenth century. The term coined to describe it, fin de siècle, itself accelerated the process already underway. Apocalyptic expectations can become feedback loops in certain situations. You might call it self-fulfilling prophecy, but in English this term carries a