Yeah, but all this has meant is an imbalance in population growth. Countries like Japan are having a big issue with an aging population, while places like Nigeria have exploded in terms of population.

Yeah, the thought crossed my mind too. Though, the drop in sperm counts has been going on for a while—part of the reason for the dropping birth rates in Scandinavia.

Wonder if we have enough power left over the global oligarchy to actually do something about this?

But I'm not really a European-American. I live in an area with a lot of immigrants—and the ones from Europe don't see me as European—and with good reason. Most of them wonder why white Americans claim to be English, Irish, etc. when the English ancestor in question left Albion 400 years ago or even 150 years ago.

I…

My point is that I don't know what you call those ancestors except "white" or "American". There's not a good term for them—WASP, maybe, but a lot of the WASP stereotypes don't fit—my people were mostly farmers out West (whereever West was at a given moment). (Old habits die hard—one of my cousins is a farmer, albeit…

The white/non-white thing is very American. In most places, there's much more focus on one's particular nationality or ethnicity. So, in one sense the categorization of "white" is actually an indicator of how *successfully* the U.S. has assimilated a large number of groups. In that sense, the black/white division…

It's a tricky thing for a lot of pale folk though—I mean, I don't actually know all the ethnicities of my ancestors and the ones I do know don't play a large part in how I do things. Yes, I have German ancestry on both sides, but I don't have any particular affinity for modern-day Germans. At this point, the legacy…

El Cerrito to Alameda. Can we just get to the point and say Berkeley? Because that's really what we're looking at—Berkeley and its sphere of influence.

In opera, it's not a simple case of white-washing. Basically, voice comes first. Aida is often the calling card of black sopranoes, but if you have the voice for Aida, you sing it. (Aida requires a fair amount of power.) Opera is where you see black German countesses, black French knights, and, of course, a whole…

You replied to more than one person, including me. Do you really have no idea how any of this works?

Geez, you went to the bother of cutting and pasting from a comment, but didn't notice the writer's name? Or mine?

They're different.

You're still not getting what I wrote. Apparently, because you don't actually pay attention.

I am one of those people who gave great birthday parties for my kid—you don't want to know some of the lengths to which I've gone—though I'm a DIY type rather than spend the money type—but even I got sick of goody bags. After a while, I went for kids making something and taking it with them, or one simple thing.

Actually, I didn't use the future tense. Nor did I say what you quote me as saying, so you're way off here. Anway, saying that people might suffer more in the future is tacitly conceding the other poster's point—the Millennials haven't faced the adversarial conditions of the people who survived the Great Depression…

Wow, mixed feelings about this. First several seasons were great, but when Skully gave up her baby (and the only child she was ever going to be able to have) for what was basically her job and the search for Fox's sister ended up with a lame spirit quest stuff, the show had really jumped the shark for me. The first…

So, they don't teach history now? This isn't hard to check out—the rates of poverty, the rates of mobilization, etc. It's all well-documented. Also, I had older parents, so they lived through it. And, yes, from 1929 through 1945, much was expected and times were tough.

I would say the one huge break afterwards was…

Yeah, well that's where the difference between early Gen X and younger Gen X really shows. I'm stuck with the Boomers for life or extreme old age. Particularly now that they're working very hard on life-extension.

In the grand perspective of things, yes—that is a sense of entitlement. Look at history—even U.S. history. Not a lot of guarantees. Plenty of immigrants didn't feel like being drafted into the U.S. Civil War. Or even the people born in the 1920s who spent their childhoods struggling through the Great Depression…

As someone who sometimes gets classed as Boomer, but am actually early Gen X—yep, this is the critical difference. As the Boomers passed 30, they made a lot of noise about the inferiority of us youngsters. We lacked the *idealism*, the *wonderfulness* of true Boomers. Oh, and things were just.so.much.better in the…

Yep—well, most will. People often confuse generational attributes with the attributes of being younger or older. I do think the Millenial group has had to deal with a massive switch in expectations though—a lot of them did exactly what they were told in school and college only to find themselves underemployed with…

The fat-shaming bit—a bit of a narcissism giveaway.

Scary thing is David Chase based Livia Soprano on his own mother . . .