For those of you who weren’t around in King James’ time, threescore and ten is the Biblical length of a man’s life, seventy big ones. This is being written on my birthday, March 31, so you can’t see it until what some have called my natural birthday or later.
From my long-ago reading of the Old Testament, it says that Methuselah lived almost a thousand years and others back then nearly as long. Then, and from what I remember this is not overstating the case, God got sick of us.
Jehovah simply refused to deal with us for so long a time and cut us down to 120 years max. As it happens, 120 seems about the absolute limit now which nobody quite reaches.
It is true that the average age of expiration on the human delivery box is much, much higher today, but that is because of earlier infant mortality and hard life of the average hunter-gatherer or peasant. Surprisingly, the maximum hasn’t changed that much since the sixth century and after, when the Old Testament was actually written.
It was not unusual for a classical Greek of the upper classes not only to live, but to be fully active into his nineties, but then, as now, that 100 is a long climb and a serious upper limit.
In the 1950s a person reaching 100 was sometimes on the news. Invariably the birthday boy or girl was sitting in an easy chair. It was clear sitting upright was only for special occasions.
BRIEF special occasions.
There is a guy in my apartment building who is 83 and still has the energy of a ten-year-old kid. It is very hard to tell the age of people when they get my age, but there are lots and lots of people older than I am, and while they can’t do what a teenager CAN do, they can do pretty well everything that a teenager WANTS to do.
With one exception.
In fact, all that football practice and running is miserable for most people. Today entertainment consists largely of sitting there at machines.
This is one of those quiet revolutions that everybody sees and THEREFORE nobody THINKS about it.
The budget cannot be balanced while the population has a soaring burden of retirees. Our budget crisis is largely a result of the Green No White Children Movement represented by the movie Soylent Green in the hippie years.
So we filling in with colored immigrants and huge nonwhite families and the economy has, for the first time in white American history, gone into stagnation and will be doing the usual colored downslide in the not-so-distant future.
Everybody SEES it happening, but, as in the case of the Mantra, no one NOTICES the obvious in action.
#1 by Simmons on 04/04/2011 - 9:30 am
America is a poorly run day care center. This is merely a reflection of the minds of the swing voter, white women, whose sense of duty has been hijacked and abused.
Should be interesting now that Obama has to go trolling for the white women’s vote, and the GOP has to go into fright mode the tussle between vanity and fear.
So just maybe the left will ratchet up their own fear campaign against “racists”, what an opportunity for us, as they try the carrot and stick with the swing voter.
#2 by Dave on 04/04/2011 - 9:58 am
I think this is the first time in my life I have heard anybody mention the obvious truth that there is an upper limit on the human life span that has always been.
Instead, we are endlessly flogged with the propaganda that “everybody is living longer”, which then excuses government from honoring its promises – promises that should have never been made in the first place.
Anyway, the fact that real per capita incomes have ceased to grow has nothing to do with age demographics and has everything to do with race demographics.
The irony is that the whole of America has become the old Confederacy economically and racially speaking. Wealth is swept into non-portfolio assets like sovereign bonds and gold and the whole system becomes unconcerned with capital as the privileged class gets to collect economic rents instead, just like under feudalism. If you don’t believe me, check out the palaces (not mansions) in the Hamptons, if you want to figure out the real economic structure of things.
Slavery is wonderful, isn’t it?
#3 by c-bear on 04/04/2011 - 8:00 pm
If it is in fact propaganda, then we need to ask ourselves 3 questions: WHO benefits from this, WHAT purpose does it serve, and WHY is this information being produced? Control.