Week 44

"In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” [..]

[America scales back, Russia acts as a spoiler]. Neither China nor India shows much interest for now in new organizing principles for the world.

Perhaps, those principles are now defined by technology, social networks and individual empowerment, forces that lie outside conventional notions of geostrategic power. But this is just another way of saying that the world’s current interregnum is little understood"

True

Wikipedia: "An interregnum (plural interregna or interregnums) is a period of discontinuity or "gap" in a government, organization, or social order". These are simply the new unknowns appearing because of the 3rd Wave. The elements listed, technology, social networks and individual empowerment are the base elements, the core of the new age. Anything incompatible with these new forces will have trouble staying afloat

"WHEN the first commercially successful steamship traveled the Hudson River in 1807, it didn’t appear to be much of a competitive threat to transoceanic sailing ships [..] so steam power gained its foothold as a “disruptive innovation” in inland waterways, where the ability to move against the wind, or when there was no wind at all, was important. In 1819, the technology vastly improved, the S.S. Savannah made the first Atlantic crossing powered by steam and sail (in truth, only 80 of the 633-hour voyage was by steam). Sailing ship companies didn’t completely ignore the advancement. They built hybrid ships, adding steam engines to their sailing vessels, but never entered the pure steamship market.

Ultimately, they paid the price for this decision. By the early 1900s, with steam able to power a ship across the ocean on its own, and do so faster than the wind, customers migrated to steamships. Every single transoceanic sailing-ship company went out of business.Traditional colleges are currently on their hybrid voyage across the ocean.Like steam, online education is a disruptive innovation — one that introduces more convenient and affordable products or services that over time transform sectors. Yet many bricks-and-mortar colleges are making the same mistake as the once-dominant tall ships: they offer online courses but are not changing the existing model"

"For three decades, people thought the best proof of foul play was a 27-second home movie of the assassination taken by a Dallas dressmaker, Abraham Zapruder. It shows JFK’s head being blasted backwards and to his left [..] But the U.S. Government insisted that JFK was shot by just one man hiding in a building far behind the limousine.

Lifton was a graduate in engineering physics. He took the black-and-white copies of the Zapruder film frames, published by the U.S. Government, to Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. He thought that Feynman would conclude, from the laws of physics, that the shot must have come from the front.

Lifton was dismayed when Feynman ignored all of the frames except the ones that show the President just before and just after the impact of the shot: [..] Feynman found that JFK’s head moved forwards at the moment of impact"

[-]