End times upon us

[waltky]

Granny says its the end times...

Worst Decade Ever?
September 2, 2011 | The 10 years since the terrorism attacks of 9/11 rank among America’s most troubled.

What has been the worst 10-year stretch in American life? It’s a timely question as the nation approaches the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This grueling decade surely stands among the nation’s most challenging. For this exercise, I’m not confining the assessment to chronological decades—the 1850s, say, or the 1960s. Instead, I’m looking at any consecutive 120-month period and asking: Which of those 10-year interludes have been the most difficult for America?

Most historians would look first at the Civil War. And a good place to begin there is on May 30, 1854, when Franklin Pierce signed the misguided Kansas-Nebraska Act. That statute lit the fuse for the war by repealing the Missouri Compromise and instead allowing each new state to vote on whether it would permit slavery—an invitation to division. Over the next decade, America soldiered through a procession of horrors: “Bleeding Kansas”; the Dred Scott decision; John Brown’s raid; Southern secession; and, above all, the relentless carnage of the Civil War. Although the battle of Gettysburg in 1863 ensured eventual Union triumph (and inspired Abraham Lincoln’s great address), the outcome was still uncertain enough in spring 1864 that many Lincoln supporters doubted that he would win reelection. Indeed, the precise bookend to the decade that began with the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the first skirmishes, on May 31, 1864, of the Battle of Cold Harbor that cost the Union over 10,000 dead with little gain.

No other decade in American life was as grim. But the Depression years, shaped by the fall of the economy and the rise of Adolf Hitler, came close. The descent began with the stock market crash in October 1929, followed by an economic collapse that saw the nation’s total employment plummet by nearly one-fourth over just four years. The buoyant leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted America’s spirits and produced a constellation of lasting reforms (such as Social Security), but fewer Americans still held jobs in 1939 than in 1929. Ten years after the crash, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler began World War II by invading Poland—a fitting coda for poet W.H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade.”

Two more-recent, somewhat overlapping stretches also tested the nation. One was the tumultuous decade that began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and ended with the first Arab oil embargo in October 1973. Those years produced almost unprecedented social turmoil—from the civil-rights struggle to the domestic battle over the Vietnam War to urban riots and the generation gap. Pulsing behind it all was the drumbeat of casualties from Vietnam—which eventually claimed 58,000 American lives. Trust in government plunged. But despite these serial traumas, this period, until its final years, also generated “the longest, until that time, period of uninterrupted growth in American history,” notes historian James Patterson of Brown University, who has written widely on the era. From 1963 to 1973, the share of Americans in poverty dropped by a third, and total employment increased by one-third. Prosperity soothed upheaval.

MORE

See also:

Disasters in US: An extreme and exhausting year
Sat Sep 3,`11 WASHINGTON – Nature is pummeling the United States this year with extremes.

Unprecedented triple-digit heat and devastating drought. Deadly tornadoes leveling towns. Massive rivers overflowing. A billion-dollar blizzard. And now, unusual hurricane-caused flooding in Vermont. If what's falling from the sky isn't enough, the ground shook in places that normally seem stable: Colorado and the entire East Coast. On Friday, a strong quake triggered brief tsunami warnings in Alaska. Arizona and New Mexico have broken records for wildfires.

Total weather losses top $35 billion, and that's not counting Hurricane Irene, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. There have been more than 700 U.S. disaster and weather deaths, most from the tornado outbreaks this spring. Last year, the world seemed to go wild with natural disasters in the deadliest year in a generation. But 2010 was bad globally, and the United States mostly was spared.

This year, while there have been devastating events elsewhere, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Australia's flooding and a drought in Africa, it's our turn to get smacked. Repeatedly. "I'm hoping for a break. I'm tired of working this hard. This is ridiculous," said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who runs Weather Underground, a meteorology service that tracks strange and extreme weather. "I'm not used to seeing all these extremes all at once in one year."

The U.S. has had a record 10 weather catastrophes costing more than a billion dollars: five separate tornado outbreaks, two different major river floods in the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River, drought in the Southwest and a blizzard that crippled the Midwest and Northeast, and Irene. What's happening, say experts, is mostly random chance or bad luck. But there is something more to it, many of them say. Man-made global warming is increasing the odds of getting a bad roll of the dice. Sometimes the luck seemed downright freakish.

MORE

 

[rdean]

finally

 

[whitehall]

The worst what? What is it with the spoiled generation? Don't they have any concept of history and the sacrifices America made in two world wars in the last century? Do they need to bad mouth the greatest Country just to feel good about socialism? Our "poor" live better than half the countries in the world. Our life style is the envy of every country in the world. The rest of the world tried to emulate the concept of Freedom that we enjoy thanks to the greatest document ever written, the US Constitution, and they still haven't gotten it right. You can criticize every decade back to Jamestown if you want to feel sorrry for the US but it would only illustrate your ignorance.

 

[HUGGY]

Granny says its the end times...

Worst Decade Ever?
September 2, 2011 | The 10 years since the terrorism attacks of 9/11 rank among America’s most troubled.

What has been the worst 10-year stretch in American life? It’s a timely question as the nation approaches the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This grueling decade surely stands among the nation’s most challenging. For this exercise, I’m not confining the assessment to chronological decades—the 1850s, say, or the 1960s. Instead, I’m looking at any consecutive 120-month period and asking: Which of those 10-year interludes have been the most difficult for America?

Most historians would look first at the Civil War. And a good place to begin there is on May 30, 1854, when Franklin Pierce signed the misguided Kansas-Nebraska Act. That statute lit the fuse for the war by repealing the Missouri Compromise and instead allowing each new state to vote on whether it would permit slavery—an invitation to division. Over the next decade, America soldiered through a procession of horrors: “Bleeding Kansas”; the Dred Scott decision; John Brown’s raid; Southern secession; and, above all, the relentless carnage of the Civil War. Although the battle of Gettysburg in 1863 ensured eventual Union triumph (and inspired Abraham Lincoln’s great address), the outcome was still uncertain enough in spring 1864 that many Lincoln supporters doubted that he would win reelection. Indeed, the precise bookend to the decade that began with the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the first skirmishes, on May 31, 1864, of the Battle of Cold Harbor that cost the Union over 10,000 dead with little gain.

No other decade in American life was as grim. But the Depression years, shaped by the fall of the economy and the rise of Adolf Hitler, came close. The descent began with the stock market crash in October 1929, followed by an economic collapse that saw the nation’s total employment plummet by nearly one-fourth over just four years. The buoyant leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted America’s spirits and produced a constellation of lasting reforms (such as Social Security), but fewer Americans still held jobs in 1939 than in 1929. Ten years after the crash, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler began World War II by invading Poland—a fitting coda for poet W.H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade.”

Two more-recent, somewhat overlapping stretches also tested the nation. One was the tumultuous decade that began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and ended with the first Arab oil embargo in October 1973. Those years produced almost unprecedented social turmoil—from the civil-rights struggle to the domestic battle over the Vietnam War to urban riots and the generation gap. Pulsing behind it all was the drumbeat of casualties from Vietnam—which eventually claimed 58,000 American lives. Trust in government plunged. But despite these serial traumas, this period, until its final years, also generated “the longest, until that time, period of uninterrupted growth in American history,” notes historian James Patterson of Brown University, who has written widely on the era. From 1963 to 1973, the share of Americans in poverty dropped by a third, and total employment increased by one-third. Prosperity soothed upheaval.

MORE

See also:

Disasters in US: An extreme and exhausting year
Sat Sep 3,`11 WASHINGTON – Nature is pummeling the United States this year with extremes.

Unprecedented triple-digit heat and devastating drought. Deadly tornadoes leveling towns. Massive rivers overflowing. A billion-dollar blizzard. And now, unusual hurricane-caused flooding in Vermont. If what's falling from the sky isn't enough, the ground shook in places that normally seem stable: Colorado and the entire East Coast. On Friday, a strong quake triggered brief tsunami warnings in Alaska. Arizona and New Mexico have broken records for wildfires.

Total weather losses top $35 billion, and that's not counting Hurricane Irene, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. There have been more than 700 U.S. disaster and weather deaths, most from the tornado outbreaks this spring. Last year, the world seemed to go wild with natural disasters in the deadliest year in a generation. But 2010 was bad globally, and the United States mostly was spared.

This year, while there have been devastating events elsewhere, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Australia's flooding and a drought in Africa, it's our turn to get smacked. Repeatedly. "I'm hoping for a break. I'm tired of working this hard. This is ridiculous," said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who runs Weather Underground, a meteorology service that tracks strange and extreme weather. "I'm not used to seeing all these extremes all at once in one year."

The U.S. has had a record 10 weather catastrophes costing more than a billion dollars: five separate tornado outbreaks, two different major river floods in the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River, drought in the Southwest and a blizzard that crippled the Midwest and Northeast, and Irene. What's happening, say experts, is mostly random chance or bad luck. But there is something more to it, many of them say. Man-made global warming is increasing the odds of getting a bad roll of the dice. Sometimes the luck seemed downright freakish.

MORE

Granny is an idiot. The time encompassing the Civil War was obviously the worst ten year stretch for America. Nothing else even comes close.

 

[B. Kidd]

Granny full of beans.
If you can keep surviving, there is no end time. Just the next time.

 

[B. Kidd]

Also W-KY,
besides Granny bein' an idiot and full of beans,
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel has a message for Granny from beyond the grave:

"Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas."

 

[ColonialMarine]

The worst what? What is it with the spoiled generation? Don't they have any concept of history and the sacrifices America made in two world wars in the last century? Do they need to bad mouth the greatest Country just to feel good about socialism? Our "poor" live better than half the countries in the world. Our life style is the envy of every country in the world. The rest of the world tried to emulate the concept of Freedom that we enjoy thanks to the greatest document ever written, the US Constitution, and they still haven't gotten it right. You can criticize every decade back to Jamestown if you want to feel sorrry for the US but it would only illustrate your ignorance.

 

[whitehall]

This is the greatest Country in the world and yet there is a strange faction of Americans who scoff at words like patriotism while they continue to search for excuses for clinical depression.

 

[Zagg]

No Civil War and no Great Depression. No World Wars. Surely the past ten years haven't been the worst in American history. Perhaps what makes them seem so grim is that so many people think that it's going to be downhill from here, whereas in the past, no matter how bad things got, people still believed in the promise of the future.

 

[percysunshine]

Never let a good crisis go to waste. It is all uphill from here.

 

[Dabs]

Who gives a shit??
I don't give a shit.
The world could end tomorrow and do you think I'd care??
Let it end...get it over with. Be done with it.

 

[Wolfmoon]

The good news is we're only half way through Hurricane season.

 

[manikeny]

I think we should stop making non-sense here instead we make love not war.. lol

 

[Truthmatters]

I cant wait until 2012 is over and these nutters will go back to their caves