Mexico Beach, Florida after hurricane Michael
Credit: sun-sentinel
When I sat down to write this essay, Hurricane Michael had just devastated the West coast and pan handle of Florida, and for the media it was the A-block story. Within that great noise, like a drowning man’s head bobbing up and down in the water, I began to see a secondary story line, one that I had first become aware of less than a month earlier when I was reading, and viewing on cable news, accounts of how people behaved during the catastrophic flooding that accompanied Hurricane Florence. In the Guardian newspaper I came across an interview with a 57-year-old man in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina who was asked by a reporter why he had stayed in his home when he could have gotten out. His answer, “It’s too expensive to move out to a hotel, I could be out for days and I can’t afford to leave my home behind.”1
With Hurricane Michael I was looking for these stories, and sure […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
I think the author forgot to mention the fear of looting afterwards as a reason some people ride out storms in their homes. The world population is 7.5 billion people. The United States population is 325 million. The United States “has 25% of the worlds billionaires”, yet constitutes only 4% of the world population. That seems to say a lot about the opportunities available to anyone in this country. The three wealthy people (oligarchs) mentioned in the article, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos all started with nothing and became rich in one lifetime! The wealth they have created from nothing has also benefited others exponentially. They are also some of the most generous philanthropists around. Buffett has pledged to give away 99% of his wealth. I believe all three are Democrats and of the liberal mindset. I think exorbitant taxes (confiscation) of wealth would stifle innovation and innovators. If you don’t like inovation you can even go into politics here and become wealthy like the Obamas, the Clintons (recent examples) and many others (who started with very little). Another of the privledges that this country affords us is that if we don’t like it here we can complain. We can also leave. If we like the Scandinavian model, or the European model, or the Russian model, or the Chinese model, or the Iranian model or even the Venezuelan model we can go there (if they would let us in). But be careful about complaining in most of those other places.