Crisis of humanity: Now and way back when

If you think life is difficult, challenging or endangered now, just look at the seventeenth century, the "general crisis of mankind." Consider Thomas Hobbes, writing in the seventeenth century.

Comments from the video at the link

• "One of the bloodiest centuries in history, full of religious conflict, political strife, and revolutions. A century of total war."

• "Reminder: The Times magazine labelled 2020 as "The worst year in history." Clearly they don't know anything about history."

Media-created climate and Covid crises and revisions of the history of slavery are permeated by unenlightened, uneducated, and un-evidenced arguments, to the point that the biggest lies have become the "truth" or, in today's terms, the "narrative" of choice among the elites.

Any crisis of humanity today is due in most part to the same sort of quasi-monarchical system as led the world five hundred or even three hundred years ago, only now the monarchs are the politically connected oligarchs, the billionaires, and the owners of the dominant communication channels. Two hundred years ago, there may have been a few billionaires -- at least adjusted for inflation -- while today there are hundreds of them. Two hundred years ago, there were royal families who maintained their 'right' to rule, and today there are similar royal families who presume the same right to tell people what to do, only these 'families' are more likely to be politicians, academics, and other self-proclaimed practitioners of the art of "We know better than you as to what is right for you and what you have to do."

The greatest achievement of the past two hundred years has been the rise of now over six billion people out of poverty, from a world and time where poverty was pervasive, pernicious and lethal, where life expectancy was less than half of what it is today, where half of children died before the age of five (while today we kill them in the womb and many countries don't count children until they have survived those five years), where average income in today's dollars was $3 per capita (vis-a-vis today's $30).

The "Spanish flu" killed many more people than Covid, primarily young and healthy people, at a time when the world population was a quarter of what it is today. Five million "Covid" deaths in two years in a world population of over 7.6 billion is not much more than "measurement error," both in how medical officers determine Covid to be THE cause of death and how bureaucrats compile death counts. AIDS has killed over 70 million people and while we know quite well how AIDS has been transmitted, there have not been any quarantines, lockdowns, or condom (the equivalent of today's masks) mandates in the past forty years we have lived with AIDS, and the pandemic continues. Yet as evidence surfaces that masks are ineffective if not dysfunctional, that natural acquired immunity is superior to vaccines, that vaccines are killing people and producing major and minor side effects, that lockdowns and high vaccination rates don't stop infections, ICU use, or deaths, and that millions of people are choosing to leave the workforce rather than accept vaccine mandates, it is time to re-imagine healthcare, medical treatment, and threats to personal liberty rather than to continue with political rhetorical nonsense such as "Build back better."