History is just a collection of four-generation length movies that take 80 years to make. George and Tom played leading roles in the classic documentary, ‘The American Revolution.’
The second flick, ‘the Civil War’ took only 71 years to produce because Abe was shot before completion.
Following this tragic-drama, Teddy foreshadowed America’s leap on to the world stage in ‘the Great Wars of WWI & WWII.’
Our movie, our very own contribution to the fabled glory of the Generational Time Continuum, began in 1943, with in theater viewing scheduled no later than the summer of 2026. ‘Millennial’ was the generic title given, however, after Trump won in 2016, ‘Apocalypse Soon’ has been suggested.
Having a front row seat since September 1943, I am going with The Cultural Wars as my title for this 4th and possibly last Turning flick.
1st Turning The HIGH (1943-1963)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945
The PROPHET: Churchill1874, Stalin 1878, Harry Truman 1884, Mao Tse-tung1893, Ho Chi Minh1890, Chiang Kai-shek 1887, Charles de Gaulle 1890, Nikita Khrushchev 1894, David Dwight Eisenhower1890
Every great movie spills out in four stages, what Neil Howe in his book, Fourth Turning, calls turnings. The first act, in Howe lingo the 1st turning, (1943-1963) opens with the situation, where we are, at that point in time.
Marion, aka my father, ditched his slide rule and retired to Altamonte Springs, Florida circa 1978. Three years later D.H. Baldwin Cincinnati home of Baldwin Piano & Organ had shipped all manufacturing to the Sunbelt, diversified into financial services and gone bankrupt.
Bretton Woods Conference 1944
The Bomb 1945
Korean War 1950
Cuban Missle Crisis 1962
2nd Turningthe AWAKENING (1963-1986)
Ruby Shoots Oswald November 24, 1963
The NOMAD: Reagan 1911, JFK 1917, Nixon1913, LBJ1908, MLK1929 In the sequence of things, the next act belongs to the NOMAD, the pot stirrers, the men of action, the go-to-guys that get the show on the road for the 2nd turningreferred to as the Awakening (1963-1986)
Nixon’s 1972 visit to China , a handshake from Mao and a noodle lwsson by Zhou Enlai.
3rd Turning the UNRAVELING (1984-2008)
The HERO: Bill Clinton1946, George ‘W’ 1964, Obama 1961,Putin1952,Merkel 1954 The 3rd turning is always called the Unravelling where history gets out of hand and the super HERO is born. (1984-2008)
World Trade Center 11 September 2001
4th Turning A Crisis (2008-2026)
January 2020 COVID 19 arrives.
The ARTIST: Trump1946, Xi Jinping 1953, Putin1952.Obama1961 At last we get to the uncut action scenes with real and unrehearsed special effects, the 4th turning A Crisis (2008-2026). The tension keeps building until the climax, followed by the resolution. This is always the best part of any story.
As an investor from China once told me, “When the donkey and elephant make war upon each other, few in your country benefit.” The bitter partisan divide in America today is a strategic liability. This division will affect the trade, economic, technology, and space policies of this country—at a time when consistency and bipartisan leadership is needed in all these areas. Until we recognize China’s threat and rally as one nation, America’s surrender to China in the new cold war is assured.
A year later, on 14 August 1942, President Roosevelt issued the following message, commemorating the first anniversary of the “Atlantic Charter”.
‘The Atlantic Charter’
Declaration
of Principles issued by the President of the United States and the Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom
FDR President of the United States and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, have met at sea.
The President and the Prime Minister have had several conferences. They have considered the dangers to world civilization arising from the policies of military domination by conquest upon which the Hitlerite government of Germany and other governments associated therewith have embarked, and have made clear the steps which their countries are respectively taking for their safety in the face of these dangers.
Robert Spalding: “Geopolitical Risk Rising: Stealth War With China” (Hedgeye Investing Summit) 5,181 views •Nov 19, 2019
Spalding’s Wizened Advise
“The
President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr.
Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, being
met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the
national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes
for a better future of the world.
First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;
Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;
Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;
Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;
Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security;
Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;
Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;
Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT & WINSTON S. CHURCHILL.”
Hitler – then USSR – now the CCP
FDR & Churchill – then Reagan & Gorbachev – now Trump & Xi Jinping
“A year
ago today the Prime Minister of Great Britain and I, as representatives of two
free nations, set down and subscribed to a declaration of principles common to
our peoples. We based, and continue to base, our hopes for a better future for
the world on the realisation of these principles. This declaration is known as
the Atlantic Charter.
A year ago
today the nations resisting a common barbaric foe were units or small groups
fighting for their existence. Now these nations and groups of nations in all
the continents of the earth have united. They have formed a great union of
humanity, dedicated to the realisation of that common programme of purposes and
principles set forth in the Atlantic Charter through world-wide victory over
their common enemies. Their faith in life, liberty, independence, and religious
freedom, and in the preservation of human rights and justice in their own as
well as in other lands, has been given form and substance as the United
Nations.
Freedom and
independence are today in jeopardy the world over. If the forces of conquest
are not successfully resisted and defeated there will be no freedom, no
independence and no opportunity for freedom for any nation. It is, therefore,
to the single and supreme objective of defeating the Axis forces of aggression
that the United Nations have pledged all their resources and efforts.
When victory comes we shall stand shoulder to shoulder in seeking to nourish the great ideals for which we fight. It is a worth-while battle. It will be so recognized through all the ages, even amid the unfortunate peoples who follow false gods today. We reaffirm our principles. They will bring us to a happier world.”
Rule of Law, Accountability, Property Rights & Strong Government
Empires of the Silk Road, by Christopher I. Beckwith separates the history of civilization into trade by land over the Silk Road from the Bronze Age until Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. After the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English colonized the entire world. everything went by sea, and the Ottoman Empire ceased to be.
Xi’an Begins the Beguine
We spent 2008 to 2013 in Zhengzhou midway between Beijing and Xi’an (now famous for the terra cotta warriors) and Xi’an the Beguine was as far as we got. However, this video professionally tells the story.
Urumqi it must be
Urumqi is the air exit to Baku and beyond. The Turks get on the plane in Istanbul when we get off to go visit their families in Urumqi. We never got out of the airport concourse in China but we never wanted to leave the Baku one.
When I was at least 12, Marion and Esther, my G.I. generation parents took me to Coney Island. I was still too scared to ride the roller-coasters but the ‘Dogems’ appealed to my passive-aggressive nature. Once back home Marion asked me if I noticed the black kid I had banged into several times? “No, why?”
Well, for more than 65 years, Coney Island and its Sunlite Pool had been a riverside playground for most of the people of Cincinnati; it boasted cleanliness, thrilling rides, a place to swim and dance, a whisper of bygone days. But it was closed to blacks. The pool, even longer. That a place of public accommodation would remain a pocket of segregation as long as it did — especially in a Northern, industrial city — surprises many, astounds others. After all, the Supreme Court had ordered schools desegregated in 1954. The park finally opened its gates to blacks in 1955, and by the time the pool was integrated — May 29, 1961 — the civil-rights struggle was well under way, punctuated by sit-ins and demonstrations around the country.
I was a Baby Boomer enjoying my childhood midway through Act I (1943-1964) of Neil Howe’s 4th Turninga four-generation live action, socio-political-psycho-economic histo-drama, I call, “Apocalypse Soon, Armageddon Later.” Starring fellow Boomers; George ‘W’ 1946, Hillary 1947, Bill Clinton 1946, Trump 1946, Xi Jinping 1953 and Putin 1952.
On my street, Mooney Avenue, we had 70 kids in an approximate 60-40 split between Protestants and Catholics. As children of a fervent Christian Scientist mother, my sister and I tried to hide under the Protestant umbrella. The Catholic kids went to Saint Mary’s and the rest of us attended Hyde Park elementary. So, in my 1955 life experience, no black kids here, no black kids there and no black kids anywhere except for that kid on the ‘Dogems.’
Marion always bought ugly used cars like this ’53 Nash Ambassador – ‘Greg’ as Esther called him, drove us to Sunday school at the 1st Church of Christ Scientist Norwood then came back an hour later to pick us up. Norwood was a future Trump country neighborhood where everybody was white and wore blue collars to work at the GM Fischer Body plant.
Two Sundays a month, after Marion got paid, we went to Frisch’s Big Boy on Duck Creek and ate in the car. Whether it was a payday Sunday or a fried chicken at home Sunday, I’d come back with a headache from my hour-long lesson in Mind Over Matter and the evils of materia-medica. My physical remedy for this meta-physical problem, was holding a cold wash cloth to my left temporal.
Headaches: Invalidating the self. Self-criticism. Fear.
My second wife gifted me with Louise Hay’s book Heal Your Body A-Z to teach me what I failed to learn in Sunday School.
RELIGION was my number one childhood complaint – “can’t we all just be normal kids like everybody else on the block” – number two was Marion shaming us with the only non-GM or Ford vehicle in Hyde Park, and used at that.
RACE RELIGION POLITICS SEX & MONEY
However, after Labor Day 1955, Marion drove me half way across town – to the east/west dividing line – to my first day at Walnut Hills High School. The school was smack dab in the middle of EVANSTON and from outward appearances an all-black community. I read recently that Cincinnati was the 8th most segregated city in the USA. Just looking out the window I couldn’t tell if they were Protestant or Catholic but they were the same color as that kid I bumped into at Coney Island.
But, oh Lordy, Lordy the halls of the 2,000+ 7-12th grade students at Walnut Hills High School were populated with black kids and white kids, but half of the white kids were Jews. Marion had warned me that, “if I didn’t learn anything from the Jews, I would never learn anything.” The first thing I noticed was that all the Jewish girls had breasts.
Secondly, while the Coney Island pool wouldn’t be integrated until the year I graduated, at WHHS all the boys swam naked. In my swim class everyone had more pubic hair, than I had hair on my head. Walnut Hills was an academic melting pot, my class of 305, had kids from every neighborhood in the city – places I had never heard of, let alone visited. What WHHS didn’t have was ‘greasers or hoods.’ Well, we did have Marty until he dropped out in the tenth grade. Marty wore ducktails and tried to act tough-cool but the only status symbol at WHHS was your grade point average.
My favorite WHHS grad was Miller Huggins, Class of 1897 pictured with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Miller’s father was a Methodist and prohibited his son from playing semi-pro ball on Sundays. Huggins graduated from law school and his professor, none other than William Howard Taft advised him that he’d make more money playing baseball.
Huggins set an MLB record on June 1, 1910 with six plate appearances but no at bats, with four walks and two sacrifice flies. Huggins, was short but WHHS smart and managed the Yankees from 1921-29. The Yankees swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1927 World Series. This team became known as Murderers’ Row, and is considered the one of the greatest teams in baseball history.
My favorite famous WHHS grad was Jerry Rubin who went off to Berkley to found the ‘Yippies’ and protest the Vietnam War.
I passed the reading/math test to gain admittance to WHHS but Latin, Trig, Physics and Chemistry left me intellectually challenged in a very competitive environment. That, plus suffering from a severe case of homework avoidance syndrome, left me at the back of the pack on graduation day in 1961.
Of the 305 graduates, the top 100 went off to Harvard, Princeton, Yale and beyond. The middle third headed for Prairie League universities especially the hometown favorite the University of Cincinnati. My application to UC’s school of Architecture was rejected because I had not graduated in the top 10% of my high school class.
Tom Thacker along with Tony Yates were our most famous classmates in the ’61-’62 year.
I was happy to just be a poly-sci guy at Miami or Antioch but Marion, the hard knocks engineer, wasn’t about to pay for any of that monkey business. So, Howard, Eddie and I entered UC’s Ding-Dong, two-year, associate’s degree program. I did so well relearning 7th grade Algebra, English and History that I was granted admission to the 1962 class of Architecture.
Cincinnati was 85% German Catholic, home to Hebrew Union College and Rabbi Silver founder of Reformed Judaism. Thus, Cincinnati was blessed with a pragmatic German education culture. This meant that even though I missed out on Harvard I was going to be a University of Cincinnati Co-Op student and go to work for a living from my Freshman year on.
The University of Cincinnati was the first university in the world to offer cooperative education. A bust of UC co-op founder Herman Schneider stands outside Baldwin Hall.
Herman Schneider (1872–1939), engineer, architect, and educator, concluded that the traditional learning space or classroom was insufficient for technical students. Schneider observed that several of the more successful Lehigh graduates had worked to earn money before graduation. Gathering data through interviews of employers and graduates, he devised the framework for cooperative education (1901). However, in 1903 the University of Cincinnati appointed Schneider to their faculty. In 1905 the UC Board of Trustees allowed Schneider to “try this cooperative idea of education for one year only, for the failure of which they would not be held responsible.” The cooperative education program was launched in 1906, and became an immediate success.
RACE RELIGION POLITICS MONEY & SEX
My Coop Job ’61 to ’67 was as an architectural “Apprentice” above the Colony theater on Shaker Square
I spent Spring and Fall quarters 1961-1967 working as an architectural co-op student in the offices of Outcalt, Guenther, Rode, Toguchi and Bonebrake, the biggest architectural firm in Cleveland. Thanks to Marion’s big sister, who got me the job after high school and Herman Schneider, I was able to pay my way through seven years of university and learn firsthand that architects don’t make any money.
Walnut Hills, the Harvard of Cincinnati’s Public Education System
Withrow High School named Ohio’s most beautiful by Architectural Digest. Designed along with Walnut Hills High School by the grandfather of one of my alphabetically speaking best friends, Sted Garber.
Marion, was hell bent on sending me to the best high school in Cincinnati, but he wanted me to make the decision. My options were Withrow, three blocks away, Indian Hills or Country Day, private schools in an aristoi neighborhood a few miles further east. The fourth consideration was Walnut Hills, where I had received an invitation because I had passed the entrance test. At Hyde Park elementary I sat behind Steve Hussey and in front of Bob Yeager, my future classmates. I didn’t copy Hussey’s answers and I’m sure Yeager, our de facto class leader, would never look my way.
What to do? When Esther asked me, now that I was twelve, did I want to join the church? I gave a near instant response, NO, I want to be a Presbyterian! But, three doors down Bob Shirley, older brother of Kathy Shirley, my Drexall drug store cherry coke first date, gave me his Walnut Hills sales pitch.
Tom, the homework’s not that bad. It’s easy to get there, you catch the 69 Madisonville at the end of the street, transfer at Peebles Corner to the 31 Vine Woodburn, walk 3 blocks in the rain, sleet or snow and you’re there.
Jimmy Fallon jokes about how 17 students from the same high school got perfect ACT scores. Our class of ’61 had 31 SAT scholarship recipients.
In 1935 the Board of Education confirmed the status of the school as “an institution specialized for college preparation.” Again in 1972, the Board of Education reaffirmed the position of Walnut Hills High School as a six-year, college preparatory school. As early as 1926 a systematic method of pupil selection was adopted. Today all students enter the school after passing a special college preparatory examination.
The Recipe for Saving Public Education
Municipal (free) Six Year (get ’em when they’re young) College PreparatoryHigh School (everybody’s going to college) open to all (swim with every fish in the sea) qualified elementary students city wide.
The Bad Guys in 1950’s according to my Weekly Reader in Hyde Park Elementary school, Cincinnati, Ohio. My 1955 6th Grade map in the Weekly Reader had the world from east of Italy to Hong Kong colored in Red, ‘Big Bad Red.’
On Mooney Avenue, Andre my fellow classmate and across the street neighbor, along with 3rd grader Greg didn’t know squat or could care less about Russia or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics but China that was different. I mean everybody knew that China had a Great Wall and if you dug a hole deep enough you would come out on the other side somewhere in China. We managed a whopping three feet, when Mrs LeClair, doctor LeClaire’s wife, Andre’s mother or “Dorthy” to politically incorrect – at an early age – me, came out to save us. Not for digging our way to China, just messing up the yard.
Andre and I along with 303 others graduated from Walnut Hills, Cincinnati’s municipal college preparatory high school, in May 1961
Andre went to a good school Earlham, while Howie, Eddie and I shuffled off to the University of Cincinnati’s ‘Ding-Dong” two- year associate program for scholastic remediation because we were in the lower third of our class in high school. We all mastered 7th grade algebra, 8th grade English, and a subject I had never heard of PSYCH 101. History, my favorite subject at Walnut Hills, was dispensed in a 500 seat lecture hall where the professor was worried about the ‘Commies’ dropping the ‘Big One.’
“When it comes, I’m going sit on the lawn in Mt. Adams with a case of Schoeling Little Kings and watch the show.”
Little Kings and its distinctive 7-ounce green bottle were invented in the ’50s when patrons of Montgomery Inn didn’t want to purchase full-sized beers to pair with shots of whiskey. Rumor is that the draft system at the restaurant was broken and no one wanted to buy a big 12-ounce bottle of beer when they just wanted a chaser, so the Schoenling’s started packaging their cream ale in smaller bottles.
Drafted twice, I watched Alan Shepard land on the Moon on my BOQ TV at Ft. Sill. A year later I was on board the USS Okinawa as it pulled into Hong Kong harbor for a ten-day ‘liberty-call.’
Be Careful What You Dig For
‘My Weekly Reader‘ map was still colored red but now the ‘Bad Boys’ were trying, according to the CIA Military-Industrial complex, to paint Vietnam red from top to bottom. I spent my entire October ’69 to October ’70 tour observing the shoreline of both Mainland China and Vietnam.
My first marital partner and I visited Hong Kong in 1981 on our way to Singapore. The Star Ferry was still chugging away, Victoria Peak had a ‘Wendy’s’ at the top but the US Navy was no longer welcome.
An Architect and his Money are soon Parted
On 8 January 2008 I closed on a home that cost three times my monthly income.
867 Tyler, Eugene, OR
“Well Mr. Gregory how did you expect to pay for it?”
I didn’t have a clue, Physics, Chemistry and for sure Trigonometry were not my best subjects at Walnut Hills High School. The only way I made it through Calculus in DAAP (Design, Art, Architecture & Planning) was copying Tom Sezniak’s paper.
Then I had what they call in Eugene, an epiphany. I was thinking back on the cosmic reason Andre and I were digging that hole in his back yard.
Teach ESL in China
Teaching ESL freshman English majors using the Toastmasters format at Henan Agricultural University in Zhengzhou, Mainland China 2009.
My status, as a resident American economic refugee in Turkey, keeps me in a daily quandary over the coming apocalypse as predicted in Neil Howe’s Fourth Turning.
Where are we in the 4th Turning?
First we have to understand how the Crisis is broken down into sections. The Crisis starts with a Catalyst, which Strauss and Howe describe as “a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood”.Following the Catalyst, society should move quickly, typically from 1-5 years after the catalyst, into the regeneracy, which is “a new counter entropy that re-unifies and re-energizes civic life”. The Regeneracyshould last from 10-15 years. And then finally we have the Climaxwhich is a relatively short period of extreme conflict that leads to a Resolution.
The 4th Turning starts with the 2008 Financial Crisis as the CATALYST then through the stages of REGENERACY , CLIMAX & RESOLUTION by 2026.
Neil Howe originally considered 9/11 as the Catalyst, it was a startling event that produced a sudden shift in mood. But when 1-5 years later expected ‘country really started to pull together’ didn’t happen, Howe re-calibrated the 4th Turning start-finish dates from the 2008 Financial Crisis to 2026.
My ‘putative’ spouse, Jane Marie, 2nd from the left, and I packed our 40 boxes of Chinese collectibles and emigrated to Antalya to catch the last act of the 4th Turning 2014-2026on Turkey’s Mediterranean Riviera.
On November 9th at 4:00 AM our time we watched with absolute certainty – the shock and awe – of the 4th Turning. It wasn’t the ‘black swan’ that everyone expected it was an ‘orange swan.’Jane Marie and all of her friends, her friends’ friends and 95% of FACEBOOK posts went into apoplexy – this was not how the 80 year, four generation ‘Boomer’ movie was supposed to end.
Following the Catalyst, society should move quickly, typically from 1-5 years after the catalyst, into the regeneracy; Lehman 2008 – Trump 2016, looks to me Neil Howe missed it by three but then there’s the FED move in 2013.
The 4th Worm HasTurned
The current 4th Turning is all about Money, not Race, Religion, Sex or Politics. Lehman Brothers was the Catalyst in 2008 but as Alan and I argue, in our forth-coming book,“Be Your Own Central Bank,” the Fed kicked off Step 2: Regeneracy with their May 22, 2013 Taper Tantrum. Almost five years after the crash, 12 trillion of funny money has been issued and 95% of the world’s peeps are not a cent richer.
Step 2 is Regeneracy “a new counter entropy (the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system) that re-unifies and re-energizes civic life.” The Regeneracy should last from 10-15 years. September 15, 2018 will be the tenth anniversary of the “Big Short.” Responding to a question on the next U.S. recession, the median answer was the first half of 2019.”
Thanks to ‘Tricky Dick’ every nation on earth is kiting checks out of the same USD reserve currency checkbook but only the US has overdraft privileges. As Trump likes to boast, “America holds all the cards.” The Emerging Market countries are contemplating tossing in their cards. Venezuela has folded, and Argentina has borrowed 50 billion from the IMF house. China is the Big Dawg at the table, who is using blocked currency chips called Yuan or Renminbi.
China accuses the US of writing them a bum check, which they cashed into Yuan that even the Chinese people don’t want. It’s karma, China has been playing poker with the US using fake money, at least it is more fake than the US dollar because the Yuan is not freely traded.
“And then finally we have the Climax which is a relatively short period of extreme conflict that leads to a Resolution.” Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy – What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny,”
In Chapter 9 of “The Fourth Turning” Strauss and Howe outline how the prior Climaxhave occurred. In their analysis there is one striking similarity to each Crisis cycle: practically no one sees the climax coming, even less than a year in advance.
Rickards is my favorite ‘worm turner’ gave this Perfect Storm forecast 1) Impeachment 2) 2020 Election and 3) Spygate.
“The worm has turned” suggests a reversal of fortune, particularly the kind of situation in which the Peasants Revolt!
The United Nations sponsors musical education in Bosnia. Students, professors and administrators from participating universities, gathered at Sarajevo’s famed City Hall for the weekly Monday Concert. The UN rep gave the opening talk in American English with Bosnian translation. Even the mayor was there.
Sarajevo City Hall the ‘Temple Mount’ of the “European Jerusalem”
Situated at the intersection of three major streets in Sarajevo, the City Hall is a monument to the multiculturalism of Bosnia. Built between 1892 and 1894, the pseudo-Moorish building honored the Muslim background of this Austro-Hungarian territory. The façade is based on Mamluk-period buildings in Cairo. The building has been used for various municipal purposes since its construction, including as a city court and parliament house, which it was until 1948, when it became the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Sarajevo was the city of four religions: Catholics, Orthodox, Muslim, and Jews. The Jewish population made note of this, naming the city “The European Jerusalem.” Settled in prehistoric times, followed by Ottoman rule in the 15th century, Austro-Hungarian rule in the 19th century, Yugoslavia’s communist rule in the 20th century, and finally today’s democracy.
August 25-26, 1992, the City Hall was hit by heavy artillery and incendiary bombs. The hall was set ablaze and the entire library holdings were lost. The fire caused severe damage to the structural and decorative elements of the building. In 1996, the government of Austria funded an initial restoration effort that focused on load-bearing walls and masonry. The European Commission followed in 1999 with funds to continue restoration of structural elements
The edifice was designed by Karel Pařík in a stylistic blend of historical eclecticism, predominantly in the pseudo-Moorish expression, for which the stylistic sources were found in the Islamic art of Spain and North Africa. His epitaph reads: “Here rests the builder of Sarajevo. Czech by birth, Sarajevan by choice. – A thankful Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
In May 2014 the building reopened with a public ceremony. The restoration was completed in time to mark the centenary of World War I, triggered by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he left a reception at the building in June 1914. The building now houses the national and university libraries, the city council, and a museum. November 2014
The lower level museum presents the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Jane Marie and I would not do well on a ‘Jeopardy’ former Yugoslavia geography quiz. Slovenia (Melania Trump) and Croatia got all the goodies on the coast, Bosnia got Sarajevo (the Muslim Jerusalem & tourist Mecca) and Serbia got all the Serbs in all the wrong places.
In the Shadows of a Presidency he offers a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the actors, governments, companies, and institutions involved in Trump’s election and the payout it will yield for insiders.
“Rank order your fellow platoon members by whom you would want on your left and right in a foxhole.” At the end of the 8th week in my stay at the US Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in scenic Quantico, Virginia, I searched the posted Peer Evaluation list for my name. There I was, #49 out of 50.
I had managed to avoid the wrath of the assistant platoon sergeant, the platoon sergeant and the platoon commander for seven weeks and four days but no longer. First the Captain, “Wadid’ya do, go to sum f****ng charm school? I’m going to send you to Paris Island!” Then the Major, ” I know your type, soon as 5 o’clock comes, you’re gone. I’m going to send you to Paris Island! Lastly the Colonel, “Obviously leadership is not in your DNA but with a degree in architecture you should be able to read maps, so we’re going to make you a Forward Observer in the artillery.”
War is hell but my two months above the tree line and below the snow was my introduction to communing with nature USMC style.
No Paris Island, no Vietnam, unless you count observing Danang while aboard the USS Point Defiance on our way to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mt. Fuji, and Subic Bay. I observed that the “join the Navy and see the world” might be applicable to the civilian career overseas. Four years later I was making pretty sketches of factories in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Then God said, “Teg I found a copy of your OCS Peer Evaluation and because you have made a mockery of our Military-Industrial Complex, I’m going to send you to the civilian Paris Island – Cleveland, Ohio.”
After six miserable winters and 500 resumes I got a job in May 1985, with USAID in Ismalia, Egypt. I was paid $600/day in 2019$$ to observe all 45 research stations of the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture to determine what the US government could do for them. Since, the chief of each location had a PhD and pulled down $50-100/month, their answer was, “go home and just give us the money.”
When I qualified for a CitiMortgage ‘liar’ loan that was three times my Social Security check, I soon found myself employed as an ESL teacher in Mainland China.In 2011 Jane Marie came along and suggested we give up our subsistence level ESL gigs for life on the Turkish riviera.Expat Heaven Antalya, Turkey
What’s Going On In America?
After 12 years of living/work experience under two military dictatorships, a Communist kleptocracy and an Islamic theocracy, I became a believer in Daniel Estulin’s analogy of the elites of six economic regions of at least 600 million inhabitants playing geo-politics like a game of six player Bridge .
Group 1: USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and possibly Mexico which would allow it to reach 600 million inhabitants. Currency – US Dollar.
Group 2: Russia divided by Urals into a Western Russia (Russia – Iran – Turkey – former Soviet Turkic speaking republics and regions – Azerbaijian, Turkmenistan, Karchay-Balkar, Kazakh, Karakalpak, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Altay, Kumyk, Chuvash, Nogay, Khakas, Tyvan, Tofa, Sakha also Syria and the Balkans) and Eastern Russia (Russia-South Korea-Japan-Central Asia), Iran would join the group with Russia and Turkey and with Yemen, Bahrain and the Shia part of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia disappears as a country. Ruined economically, Saudi society would break into sectors separated by ethnicity. Currency – Ruble
Group
3: Latin America with South Africa. Currency –
Peso.
Group
4: China. Or Japan
with China if Japan cannot close the
economic agreement with the Russia-South Korea cluster. China would simply
absorb Japan because Japan is too small and too dependent on the natural
resources of others. Currency – Yuan.
Group
5: India. Or Iran
with India if Iran can not close its
deal with the Russia-Turkey economic cluster. Currency – Rupee.
Group 6:Western Europe (axis Paris-Berlin) with France’s African colonies (resources + population). Currency – Euro?
Group 7:UK with Arab countries (from Morocco to Saudi Arabia). Before Trump’s election, this option means that Israel was in serious danger. No wonder, Arnold Toynbee, one of the most influential British historians, in the 60s said that Israel has a life span of no more than 75 years. Henry Kissinger and Rothschild warned 4 years ago that Israel is going to disappear by 2022. It has already served its usefulness. The Jews were going back to Crimea. Trump’s election changed the dynamic and the elite circles had to come up with plan B – Macron, as the President of France, as I explained earlier.
After reading Estulin’s “In the Shadow of a Presidency” I have to find the Mezuzah of the elites – its Harpocrates the Greek God of silencio, secrets & confidentiality.
After the elites had assassinated RFK Senator Edward Kennedy quoted Bobby’s favorite line from George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Back to Methuselah’ – You see things; and you say, “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?” `Curiouser and curiouser!’ In the play those words, are the words of the Devil.
