Thursday, November 29, 2018

planetarianism vs. imperialism


In my beleaguered mind, there are two big-picture ways of looking at the world: the planetary point of view, as exemplified in my 'planetarian blog,' and one that looks back to the great European empires of the nineteenth century and even to great non-European empires of the past. This blog, 'Flyoverlandia,' favors this latter view. It's a more romantic, emotion-laden view of things than the Enlightenment-based planetarian view.

World War I was the great disaster for the European empires. True, they sputtered on and finally received their death blows in World War II. By the 1950s and '60s, Britain and France were divesting themselves of these overseas possessions wholesale, although not always peaceably.

I could see a return to these empires, and some others, in the coming decades. It would have to be done on a looser and more reciprocal basis, of course, but I could see major economic and even political links between the old imperial capitals and their former possessions emerging in the years ahead. This would include not only Britain and France, but Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Portugal in Europe, plus the United States (North America, the Philippines), India, China, and Japan.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

who cares?

I get very tired of news reports about what this or that celebrity 'thinks' about something. It reminds me of a statistic I came across years ago. People were polled as to  what celebrities they followed avidly. At the top of the list was Madonna, who was then at the apex of her stardom. Yet only 8% of those polled said they followed her career and pronouncements with great interest. Eight percent!

So when I hear some late-night talk show host quoted on this or that subject, I ask, 'Who cares.?' The fact is, even the most popular of these people only gets a couple million viewers a night-- this in a country of a third of a billion people! Why should anybody else care what these people 'think'-- and why is the media bothering to tell us?