Korean Baby Boomers In Transition: Fill & Download for Free

Well Australia is stuck between rock and hard place. On the one hand, it’s been completely deindustrialised relying on export of its primary industries to keep alive and largely on China for its prosperity and bailing out of baby boomers by proping real estate asset prices.On the other hand it is an Anglo colony, an extension of the old world like much of Americas and New Zealand so it likes to root for the guy that looks like him and talks the same language as him.The reality is economic might is political might. The bar China set is very low. Just don’t mess with my affairs and stay out of trouble but Australia occasionally sticks it’s head out to express it’s anxiety and rallies behind the US to express its existence. The reality is, Australian politicians love the Chinese. China gives them coushy jobs for favours like Bob Carr and there’s a new breed of them in the Adani deal so I suspect this is all just posturing. Because when push comes to shove, Australia can’t afford a South Korean type smack down. It would destroy the Australia economy and the politicians knows it.I wouldn’t read too much into war of words. There’s a lot happening in the background as Australia transitions to a mining tributary state of China eventually.And for those who just fell off their chair, China doesn’t have a bad habit of messing with foreign politics, the current corrupt political system of the west where money buys favours is working just fine for China. It’s working too well. You can keep your free press and universal suffrage. Relax. These pieces are essential for the politicians to sell Australia to China in bite size pieces while keeping the plebs subdued.

By way of introduction, and without getting into the rather tiring question of whether contemporary politics are starting to look more and more like the above, I will say that the person I identify the most with in the clip is the grumpy old man with the newspaper at 0:57 and 2:23; he encapsulates my general reception of present events quite well, better than I would be able to articulate. It’s been like that for nineteen years and I do not expect that to change in the next thirty. With this out of the way, my divinations of the future are as follows:Good news is, current musical fads in the fashion of Brazilian Funk, Justin Bieber and the like will have mostly faded away. Bad news is, our children and grandchildren will be listening to even worse crap than we have now, to the point we’ll actually miss most of the shitty pop music we have nowadays.The cohorts of “politically correct” puritan arseholes in the younger generations will have grown old and, with baby boomers mostly gone, they’ll be running pretty much everything. If you think they’re insufferable now, just wait until they have all the power in their hands and unending pain in their backs!The Brexit mess might be fixed by then. The Kashmiran mess, the Levantine mess and the Western Saharan mess will definitely not have been fixed by then. The Venezuelan mess will probably be fixed by then.The European-American pendulum of left-and right-wing nonsense will have swayed some more two or three times.It’s a coin toss whether Betty II will be still around. I call heads on that one.If the popular view of “one major pan-European conflagration every century” as a historical rule is worth anything at all, then it becomes more likely to be confirmed as WWII’s 100th birthday approaches.On a lighter note, I expect the world to be undergoing net reforestation and populational balance by that point in time.Terrorism will have long given way to the Next Big Thing.Goddamnit, I don’t even understand slang now, by mid-century I’m going to be completely screwed!I once sat down to read an old encyclopedia, and it dawned on me that the Franco-Prussian war was around as old at the time of its publication as WWI was to me. By then, the Korean War will be about as old to us as Russian Revolution is now.I have just gotten this nagging feeling that we will transition from the Beef-Pork-Chicken trinity, not into veganism, but into other types of meat. Maybe Mutton-Rabbit-something?Argentina will not have forgotten the Falklands, unless it jumps into a reckless colonization project in Antarctica.…which, by the way, I hope will otherwise remain no-man’s land.All Brazilians bitching about current problems will remember our days as a glorious golden age of development, without paying attention to the fact that we’ll be light-years ahead of our current state by then.Sometime around 2052 the world will see the release of Fast and Furious 139.I think that’s all for now; não mais, musa, não mais, for if I delved into more predictions I might risk boring or depressing the gentle reader…

The transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump certainly feels like a historic moment, historically awful for some and positive for others. If it is any comfort, an interesting new study suggests that Americans have more in common in how they view the past than the present.The Pew Research Center and A&E Network’s “HISTORY” teamed up to ask more than 2,000 Americans this question: “Please name the 10 historic events that occurred in your lifetime that have had the greatest impact on the country.” They sorted the results by generation because, obviously, different generations lived through different events.The big headline was that Americans of all generations named the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as the most important event of their lifetime by far. This was true even of older people who lived through World War II and the Vietnam War. There wasn’t much variation by age, gender, region or political leanings. African-Americans did put Obama’s election at the top.Historians certainly could marshal many arguments that 9/11 was not, in fact, the most consequential episode in history for the Silent Generation (born 1928 to 1945) and Baby Boomers (1946-1964). But something about 9/11 puts it at the top of historical memories for all generations.Nothing else comes close. The only other events listed by all generations were the election of Obama and the “tech revolution.”This is the top 10 list for millennials (1981 to 1998):9/11Obama electionIraq/Afghanistan warsGay marriageThe tech revolutionOrlando shootingHurricane KatrinaColumbine shootingDeath of Bin LadenSandy HookIt’s a sad list for the most part. Millennials tend to see Obama’s election and gay marriage as positive historic moments; the tech revolution, for sure. It is especially disturbing, though not at all surprising, to see three mass shootings so prominent in the historical memory of young people.Generation X (1965 to 1980) produced a similar list but they remember “the Fall of Berlin Wall/end of Cold War” and rank it third, according to the poll. Here’s the Gen X top 10:9/11Obama electionFall of Berlin Wall/end of Cold WarThe tech revolutionIraq/Afghanistan warsGulf WarChallenger disasterGay marriageHurricane KatrinaColumbine shootingThere’s a big jump, obviously, to the baby boomer list:9/11JFK assassinationVietnam WarObama electionMoon landingThe tech revolutionCivil rights movementFall of Berlin Wall/end of Cold WarMLK assassinationIraq/Afghanistan warsI’m a boomer whether I like it or not, and I would put Vietnam on the top of my list, no doubt. And I would have ranked the civil rights movement second — as both a triumph and a tragedy. I would have put Watergate on my list and perhaps the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973. I hope I don’t have to add Donald Trump’s election to my list in 10 years.Finally, here is the list of the Silent Generation:9/11WWIIJFK assassinationVietnam WarMoon landingObama electionThe tech revolutionCivil rights movementKorean WarIraq/Afghanistan warsI find it surprising that the civil rights movement wasn’t higher on the list and even more surprising that the Cold War — or the end of it — didn’t make the list at all.More of the items on the Millennials and Generation X lists were very time-limited, headline “news events” that saturated TV for a period: 9/11, Orlando, Hurricane Katrina, Columbine, Bin Laden’s execution, Sandy Hook and the Challenger. This might be a function of age, but it also could involve how the news media and our consumption of it have changed.It is also interesting to see that as the world has grown small and more connected, global events aren’t more prominent on young people’s historical radars. The war on terrorism, the Arab Spring or the drug wars didn’t make any lists.Mostly what struck me was how similar perceptions of historical events were across generations and our other demographic dividing lines. Obviously, all Americans don’t view these events the same way. But after a year like 2016 and an election like this one, I’m inclined to start the New Year looking for as much common ground as I can.