I’m turning 65 tomorrow, which is a big day in anyone’s life, if only because it’s the day you officially become what our government likes to refer to as a “senior citizen.” Or, hell, they probably have a different term for it now as the communists in charge go about bastardizing the language. Regardless, in 24 hours I will qualify for every “senior discount” known to mankind, so I’m cool with that.
Rather than lament the fact that I’m getting old - which does, of course, beat the alternative - and talk about all the awful news going on around us (godspeed to everyone in Louisiana) I thought I’d take just a moment to focus on some truly good news that has taken place in my lifetime.
Below is a chart from a website called “Our World in Data” - www.ourworldindata.com - which depicts the progress that mankind has made in preventing global deaths from natural disasters since 1900. Take a look at it:
In conversations I’ve had over the years about all the amazing things that have happened in my lifetime, I have tended to focus on technological advances, like putting men on the moon, the development of satellite tech, the integrated circuit, computers, cell phones, the Internet, etc. Hell, when I went into the workforce in 1979, high-speed copy machines were a new thing, no one had ever heard of a laptop computer, and we didn’t even have fax machines. To go from there to here in 42 years is really almost magic.
In the year I was born, by comparison, people talked about the miracles of Saran Wrap and underarm deodorant. It’s a big difference.
But let’s go back to that chart now. We are inundated every day with messages from our propaganda fake news media telling us that, because of this all-powerful, all-controlling thing they now call “climate change,” people all over the world are dying by the thousands due to droughts and floods and hurricanes and sea rise and wildfires and whatever else the climate “scientists” can make up to scare us with. You all know that’s true: Just tune into the Weather Channel’s coverage of Hurricane Ida today and you will be fully brainwashed within an hour with this kind of nonsense.
What this single magnificent chart tells us is that this is all a despicable lie. I came across this chart on Friday and quickly realized that, in my lifetime alone, which began in 1956, mankind has used its innovative genius to practically eliminate deaths from floods, wildfires and drought.
There’s not much you can do about the occurrence of earthquakes and extreme weather, but mass deaths from such events have been all but eliminated in 90% of the world. The deaths we still see from such events almost all take place in isolated parts of the world where building codes and infrastructure remain primitive.
In my lifetime - a nanosecond in the earth’s history - mankind has made similar progress in reductions in child mortality, prevention of mothers’ deaths during child birth, reductions in deaths from contagious diseases, and more. We have reduced the percentage of human beings living in abject poverty by something like 90% just in the last 40 years. We have seen similar improvement in human hunger and starvation.
In the United States, we have dramatically improved the quality of our air and water and saved major species like the bald eagle and grey wolf and grizzly bear and whooping crane from extinction, despite all the media-pushed hysteria to the contrary.
The incredible progress achieved in all of these areas and more has been especially rapid over the past 40 years, the time frame in which politicians, professional alarmists and the media have been pounding us with climate change propaganda.
Human beings are an amazing species that can achieve amazing things when properly directed and focused. The problems that remain before us today still exist mainly due to the reality that we have been improperly focused and directed by alarmists and those in authority towards unrealistic and unachievable solutions.
It’s a species that I’m proud to be a part of, and hope to remain a part of for many years to come.
That is all.
Happy Birthday. You beat me to 65 by 5 months. Thanks for the graph. Now I know how difficult things were for my parents living through the 20s-40s and the disasters they encounter along with WW II and Depression. Definitely the World Greatest Generation.
You guys need to join the Jack Benny club. "
I'm 39, and stop asking me that question."