Ray, things are great and getting greater!
Rush Limbaugh? I know almost nothing about him except that I gather he's a sanctimonious hypocritical drug addict, which I hasten to add is second-hand information, which is usually as good for one as second-hand smoke.
Right now, today, there are 6 billion people alive and kicking [though I admit kicking would be an exaggeration for a lot of them], give or take 100 New Zealands, which puts this little country in perspective.
That's more people alive [and perhaps kicking] than ever before. They have also got a higher standard of living than ever before. If you start at the bottom of the heap and match individuals of the same age and standard of living who were alive in 1904 with people of the same age and standard of living now, you'll find that at age 1, there are huge numbers more now with a better standard of living than those alive then, not to mention life-expectancy. At age 2, same again. And as you go up the age groups, you'll find the same thing. You'll find the same thing in 1954. Life is getting better.
In the 70 year age group, there were few in 1904 and swarms now. The standard of living now compared with then is amazing.
Now we have machines churning out the goods and services. Then we had dawn to dusk hard yakker on the farm if we weren't dying in droves from disease and war. Now we move a bit of capital around and live the life of Riley.
After three years of war in Iraq, it's a big deal that there are 1000 USA soldiers KIA. I just watched a History Channel review of Napoleon's efforts in Moscow with his 500,000 army reduced to some 20,000 survivors making it back to France. The USA could stay in Iraq for 1000 years and just be approaching the same KIA.
The "torture" in "enemy combatant" prisons pales compared with the cruelty meted out in the bad old days. Which is not to justify it, just to compare it in absolute terms.
Now we have 3G cyberspace swishing into prime time. The world is boot-strapping literally off the ground. Especially in the case of Globalstar. 6 billion people using better and better and more and more amazing tools which are increasingly taking over not just the heavy lifting [the industrial revolution] but the heavy thinking [Google does an admirable job of the memory function and autopilots fly aircraft a lot better than pilots, navigators and flight engineers did].
In 1954 there were a few million people working on creative enterprise. Now there are hundreds of millions with a lot more cash flow backing them up, enabling them to do a lot more things [such as multi-kilometre particle accelerators, Hubble telescope, genetic engineering and stuff].
One invention now earns vast amounts because each invention benefits millions instead of thousands.
It's enough to make one think the second coming has been and gone and we've entered Utopia - things do sneak up on one.
Mqurice |
