Opera 9.5 is an excellent minimal browser that runs smooth and easy. Firefox 3.0 is not. In keeping with the spirit of Opera 9.5, I’ll say no more – except this: “Damn!!”
June 29, 2008
June 19, 2008
Consequences of Empire
Have you ever heard folks bitch, moan and wail (BMW) about “hyphenated-Americans”? Usually the bitcher, moaner and wailer hails from an ethnic group which no longer uses a hyphen because they’ve been subsumed into a fictional “racial” classification called “white.” In many instances, these people are not True Whites…they’re honorary whites who have only been welcomed into the fold over the past two centuries.
Southern and Central Europeans have often been considered to “dark” to be charter members. The privilege of charter membership has been reserved (at least prior to the late 1800s) for Normans (who didn’t need to be deemed “white” because of their military success over the Angles, Saxons and Jutes of England), Angles and Saxons, Jutes, and Scandinavian types. True Whites, according to the lore, have blond hair, “fair” skin (does that mean fair as in “fair to middling”), thin and wavy hair, thin lips and a host of other biological features which tend not to characterize so many new honorary whites.
In America today, it seems that many of the newbies have forgotten the arduous process by which they came to be included. They forgotten that they’re not True Whites. Perhaps it has been the prescence of so-called Blacks, Browns, Yellows and Reds which has contributed most to this amnesia. At bottom, it may be a fear of losing honorary white status that sits at the bottom of their fear of Balkanization. If the Empire shatters into a thousand tiny pieces of ethnicity, what are the consequences for me and my kind?
What loss of status will I be subjected to for want of privileged biological features? Can I make it with silicone and a bottle of bleach?
In this Empire, everyone stands to lose as “identity” becomes fractured. Consider the non-hyphenated, non-White persons who choose (through wearing label pins with flags and such) to identify primary and principally with the Empire and the victors. Under Balkanization, the spoils may not always go to the victors. Concessions won through hard fought genocide and kidnapping cum enslavement could continue to be wrangled away by such nagging practices as coalition politics, protesting and voting.
Under this scenario, you’re going to need much more than silicone and a bottle of bleach. You’re going to need to be a “Roman” citizen and a barbarian at the gate — at the same time.
June 17, 2008
Et tu, Hillary
“Two for the price of one is simply too damned expensive. I’ll take the zero.” – hypothetical Barack Obama statement to the prospect of a regime in exile and a regime in waiting.
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