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"When Italian comedian Beppe Grillo created his Five Star Movement three-and-a-half years ago, he probably wasn't expecting it to become the voice of a country beset by a deep economic and political crisis. The overwhelming performance of the Five Star Movement in the general elections that were held Sunday and Monday confirmed that the crisis of legitimacy that is threatening the traditional political parties in Europe has finally reached Italy. While Grillo's party ended up in third place, one in four Italians voted for it, and the party became the most voted-for single party into the Chamber of Deputies (the two mainstream parties, the Democratic Party and the People of Freedom, competed as part of electoral coalitions)."

"The year is 2030 and four leaders-two military, two civilian-sit around a table at the White House or the Pentagon, perhaps, or at a military headquarters or embassy halfway around the world." By Raphael Cohen at World Affairs Journal on March/April 2010.

By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on May 4, 2010.

"Toxic lies about culture are afoot in Silicon Valley. They spread too fast as we take our bubble money and designer Powerpoints to drinkups, conferences and meetups all over the world, flying premium economy, ad nauseam. Well-intentioned darlings south of Market wax poetic on distributed teams, office perks, work/life balance, passion, "shipping", "iteration," "freedom". A world of startup privilege hides blithely unexamined underneath an insipid, self-reinforcing banner of meritocracy and funding. An economic and class-based revolt of programmers against traditional power structures within organizations manifests itself as an (ostensively) radical re-imagining of work life. But really, you should meet the new boss. Hint: he's the same as the old boss."

"Something I think is already happening and will accelerate in the future, is that traditional generation gaps are going to stop being relevant."

My comment to the post: What I'd add is that the more traditional elements of generation gaps - namely the cohort/group you identify with - will remain. I'm thinking here of "You were in *this* age group when *that* global event happened." Still, on the surface I can't see anything to disagree with. Surely, the maturation of IT is definitely levelling the operational playing field quite a lot. When I started using PC's, it was considered more akin to, say, having a "chemistry set." Now, my son, my parents, and my grandparents all use the computer as a productivity device in a variety of overlapping fashions. I suppose one could argue against this, claiming (correctly) that all generations have enjoyed TV, but that's a consumption device, a small but very important distinction. As for education, you ain't kidding. In fact, noticing how my son and his peers use or do not use the internet with sufficient interest gives rise to an INTEREST gap. Namely: If you care to invest the effort, you can excel. If not, you don't have too many excuses. Regarding point #5, that's (at least) true for Gen-X'ers and younger. The idea of workplace stability seems almost anachronistic at this point. :) Great post!

"Many years ago, I visited Four Corners in the American Southwest. This is a small stone monument on a polished metal platform where four states meet. You can walk around the monument in the space of a few seconds and stand in four states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. People lined up to do this and have their pictures taken by excited relatives. To walk around the monument is indeed a thrill, because each of these four states has a richly developed tradition and identity that gives these borders real meaning. And yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one state to the other."

"What is Socratic Electronics? We live in a world where the accumulation of knowledge is exponential over time, and where the ability to continuously learn and make sound judgments is essential to survival. Formal education ought to play an important role in preparing individuals to succeed in this environment, but many traditional modes of education actually discourage development of independent thinking skills necessary for success."

The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power. What it finds frequently runs counter to common sense. More precisely, geopolitical inquiry seeks not only to describe but to predict what will happen. Those predictions frequently - indeed, usually - fly in the face of common sense. Geopolitics is the next generation's common sense. William Shakespeare, born in 1564 - the century in which the European conquest of the world took place -- had Macbeth say that history is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. If Macbeth is right, then history is merely sound and fury, devoid of meaning, devoid of order. Any attempt at forecasting the future must begin by challenging Macbeth, since if history is random it is, by definition, unpredictable. By George Friedman at StratFor on May 26, 2008.

"When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might."

"Instapaper is a great way for you to read your web content on the go using an iDevice of your choosing, but did you know that you can save those articles for offline reading on your Amazon Kindle too? Even though the regular Kindle e-reader doesn't have a traditional app store, it is possible to have your Instapaper saved content pushed directly to that e-ink display."

"Many people use the Amazon Kindle family of devices for reading a wide range of e-books. That's great, but you shouldn't forget about the tons of Kindle apps that are also available to help to improve your productivity. This is particularly true of the Kindle Fire, since it's more like an Android tablet than it's like a traditional e-book reader."

"SheerWind, a wind power company from Minnesota, USA, has announced the results of tests it has carried out with its new Invelox wind power generation technology. The company says that during tests its turbine could generate six times more energy than the amount produced by traditional turbines mounted on towers. Besides, the costs of producing wind energy with Invelox are lower, delivering electricity with prices that can compete with natural gas and hydropower."

"American biology research achieved greatness because we encouraged individual scientists to pursue the questions that intrigued them and the NIH, NSF and other agencies gave them the resources to do so. And ENCODE and projects like it are, ostensibly at least, meant to continue this tradition, empowering individual scientists by producing datasets of "higher quality and greater comprehensiveness than would otherwise emerge from the combined output of individual research projects"."

There's no way to understand politics anywhere without understanding religion, but to an outsider American Christianity -- and so American politics -- can seem almost incomprehensible. Over the last 2,000 years, Christians have quarreled themselves into 30,000 different denominations. On top of that, American Christianity, like American culture more broadly, tends to flout hierarchy and authority, which means that a sizeable number of American Christians consider themselves "nondenominational."

Even as the movement's grip tightens on the GOP, its influence is melting away across vast swaths of America, thanks to centuries-old regional traditions.

"Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated."

Bill Moyers: "There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power."

A guest essay by Spencer Wells at Seed Magazine on June 7, 2010.

"A deep power struggle is under way in the Republic of Turkey. Most outside observers see this as the latest phase in the decades-long battle between Islamism and Kemalist secularism. Others paint it as traditional Anatolia's struggle against modern Istanbul, egalitarianism versus economic elitism or democracy's rise against authoritarianism. Ultimately, the struggle boils down to a fight over a single, universal concept: power." By StratFor on August 23, 2010

"The question I want to consider in this post is whether it's helpful to think about these ancient genres together in connection with our ongoing attempt to figure out what video games are good for." By Roger Travis at Living Epic on July 26, 2010.