{"id":11025,"date":"2020-11-09T17:36:13","date_gmt":"2020-11-10T00:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=11025"},"modified":"2020-11-12T23:45:51","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T06:45:51","slug":"thats-great-thanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/11\/09\/thats-great-thanks\/","title":{"rendered":"That&#8217;s great &#8211; thanks."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2020\/12\/can-history-predict-future\/616993\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">from The Atlantic<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Story by&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/author\/graeme-wood\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Graeme Wood<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"This View of History: A Conversation With Peter Turchin\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0hTYBDjeUUU?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Peter Turchin, one of the world\u2019s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But he had to leave his office sometime. (\u201cOne way you know I am Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,\u201d he told me. \u201cI have to go for a walk.\u201d) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. \u201cA week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,\u201d Turchin said. Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk, groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging\u2014\u00ad\u00adto a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (\u201cNot all of human history,\u201d he corrected me once. \u201cJust the last 10,000 years.\u201d) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an \u201cage of discord,\u201d civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn\u2019t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early \u201970s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2020\/12\/can-history-predict-future\/616993\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click to continue reading at The Atlantic<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The Atlantic The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news. Story by&nbsp;Graeme Wood Peter Turchin, one of the world\u2019s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}