October 2007

Okay, I’ve been a bit busy lately, thus, no blogs. However, for all of you waiting on the edge of your seats, I have some general life comments…

I’ve been busy making personal life history. Yes, history is important for many reasons. Not only does it help one to understand the present much better, but on a personal level, a history recognized and dealt with is much better than no history. Now, I am a firm believer in “living in the now” as they say. However, humans live in an alternate reality. It would be nice if we could all just be like cats and dogs “living in the now” with no care for past or future. Yet, we are not. I recently read an article by the famous Carroll Quigley pointing out the erroneus nature of evolutionists feeling that humans have reached evolutionary dominance because we adapted the best to our natural stimulations. In reality, We have reached dominance as a species because we have created an alternate world to what we were naturally given. As early humanoids we were practically wiped out. Then, somehow we miraculously discovered that living in a world other than the natural world would help us at surviving when we were otherwise failing.

Thus, we live in this alternate world. Both symbolic in our minds as well as in our concrete reality. Is this for better or for worse? I don’t know, but we can understand these artificial circumstances better if we know our past…

On a lighter note, I’ve been enjoying a CD of Turkish Roma music that i checked out from the library recently.

Empire, a word that gets bounced around quite a bit in reference to corporations, popularity, and nation states. Ok, so what is an empire after all? For me, the word empire makes me think of stodgy Brits in red costumes (hehe, I mean uniforms) talking about the “white man’s burden.” So obviously, looking back in history we have the Roman empire, the Muslim empire, the Greeks, the British, etc. etc. etc. All of these examples of empires have military conquest at their center, yet, seem to have more factors involved than mere conquest. Would Rome be considered an empire if they had merely taken some lands? Rather we see a sort of cultural hegemony where conquested territories had local puppet rulers who worked with Roman administrators and basically conformed to Roman culture. People spoke Latin and Greek and generally tried to “do as the Romans do” because it enabled one to better climb the social ladder. Thus, there seems to be more involved with being an empire than mere conquest and rule. Read the rest of this entry »