Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Sun Apr 14, 2024 12:49 pm I've mentioned in these pages that somewhere around 1971, give or take a few years, and it would vary from sector to sector with probably the more complex sectors coming first, that the US entered the maintenance phase of a declining civilization. There was a slow recognition and response to that turning point.

Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity

Updated on: September 7, 2021

The Fed Has Admitted That Today’s Banking Environment Is More Dangerous Than 2007
By Avi Gilburt
Sep 24, 2025

Moreover, consider that there was one major issue which caused the GFC back in 2008, whereas today, we currently have many more large issues on bank balance sheets. These risk factors include major issues in commercial real estate, rising risks in consumer debt (approaching 2007 levels), underwater long-term securities, over-the-counter derivatives, high-risk shadow banking (the lending for which has exploded), and elevated default risk in commercial and industrial (C&I) lending. So, in our opinion, the current banking environment presents even greater risks than what we have seen during the 2008 GFC.

EXC: Inside The Secret Meetings Between Chinese Spies And U.S. Agriculture Officials Helping China Buy Farmland

Americans selling out their own country

A secretive Chicago meeting ignored by the mainstream press brought several dozen Chinese Communist Party officials face-to-face with America’s agricultural leaders.

The U.S. Heartland China Association (USHCA) pitched it as a harmless “forum,” but the real agenda was far more consequential: embedding Beijing into U.S. agriculture, food, and healthcare systems. The USHCA has a long history of enabling the CCP takeover American farmland.

A Breed in Decay: Why U.S. Millennials and Gen Z Are Dying at an Alarming Rate — Faster Than Any Other Generation in Recent History
Story by Arezki Amiri

Young adults in the United States are dying at significantly higher rates than their counterparts in other wealthy nations, according to a sweeping new analysis published in JAMA Health Forum and highlighted by Slate this August. The findings point to a deeply embedded public health issue, one that predates the pandemic and appears to be accelerating.

In 2023, more than 700,000 Americans died who would still be alive had the U.S. matched the age-specific mortality rates of 21 other high-income countries including Canada, Germany, and Japan. Of those under 65, nearly half of all deaths were deemed “excess,” meaning they likely wouldn’t have occurred elsewhere. The disparity is particularly stark for adults aged 25 to 44, where the rate of excess deaths reached 62%—a statistic that has prompted renewed concern among health researchers.

Dr. Jacob Bor, one of the study’s lead authors from Boston University’s School of Public Health, described the trend as “an unfolding generational catastrophe.” He warns that what began as a slow divergence in mortality outcomes has become a “systemic pattern of premature death unique to the American experience.”

Here a concrete example will do much more than any amount of abstraction, so let’s imagine a couple sitting in their living room watching a sitcom on television. They may be sitting side by side on the sofa, but their interactions with each other will by and large be limited to whatever won’t distract them from the program. During the time they spend staring at the screen, they experience a world of fictitious images, full of people and places who don’t exist. At intervals the sitcom is broken off to make way for an even more fictitious world in which various consumer products pretend to satisfy this or that human desire, where everyone tipping back a beer in the bar is young, well-dressed, happy, and laughing, and where asking your doctor about the latest pharmaceutical will surely cure you of an illness you don’t know you have.

Now imagine the couple getting up and going to the kitchen table to have dinner—we’ll assume they’re unfashionable enough to do this, instead of simply gobbling down their food in the living room while the television drones on. Even when they’re not watching the screen, the images that played in front of their eyes retain their presence and power. That’s not accidental, of course. Huge corporations fork over millions of dollars to cover the considerable costs of producing those images and getting them onto the screens, and I trust none of my readers are so clueless as to think they have altruistic reasons for doing so. Quite the contrary, that money gets forked over because those images shape human thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Human beings are social primates, after all, and to a very great extent they follow the familiar rule of “monkey see, monkey do.” The behavior of characters in a sitcom, or actors in an advertisement, or talking heads on a news-and-views show, becomes part of the mental world, and thus the behavioral world, of the people who watch it. Thus our couple, as they have dinner and talk, are as likely as not to regurgitate thoughts suggested to them by their years of watching television, and the actions they take will be shaped by the same source.