the news is so depressing.

I hope the San Andreas fault doesn't let go while I'm in the shower! I wouldn't want to have to leap out the window all soapy.

Well, cheer up. Iran managed to get elected to the UN's Council on Women's Rights...no more ball busting or boobquakes!

someplace between Iran's degradation of women and America's degradation of white men would be a nice change of pace.

an easy life has almost no correlation to a good life, except in the reverse, the easier the life the less rewarding it is most of the time. Living longer is not much use either. Perhaps you are not aware, but there are a great many old people who are not happy that they are still kicking, but they don't have the heart to off themselves either. Living long is much like winning the lotto, it seems like a no brainier that it is a good thing, it is an aspiration with much appeal amongst those who dont have it, but when it actually happens to you most of the time you decide that it was not so great ofter all. My Grandpa lived to be 94, the last five years after his wife died he wished he was dead too. My other grandpa live three years longer than he wanted, and he made sure everyone knew it.

How my friend you do not know the death toll of the thousand bombers fire raids on Japanese and German cities that kill more then the atom bombs attacks?

Gays and blacks and others are demanding to share the top of the mountain and you find that threatening.

As one white man to another you need counseling.

The first raid using low-flying B-29s carrying incendiary bombs to drop on Tokyo was on the night of 24"25 February 1945 when 174 B-29s destroyed around one square mile (3 km²) of the city.[citation needed] Changing their tactics to expand the coverage and increase the damage, 335 B-29s took off[1] to raid on the night of 9"10 March, with 279 of them[1] dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Fourteen B-29s were lost.[1] Approximately 16 square miles (41 km²) of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting firestorm, more than the immediate deaths of either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombs.[2][3] The US Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated that nearly 88,000 people died in this one raid, 41,000 were injured, and over a million residents lost their homes. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated a higher toll: 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department established a figure of 124,711 casualties including both killed and wounded and 286,358 buildings and homes destroyed. Richard Rhodes, historian, put deaths at over 100,000, injuries at a million and homeless residents at a million.[

It's not my intent to start nitpicking about the death of innocents but your figures only lead me to stand by my comment...

The general trend of the times is that life is much better now than it used to be..

Your comment was clearly that I was overstating the deaths from bombings raids in WW2 and you are wrong end of subject

Even though your figures state otherwise? Oh, well..

My figures state otherwise?

Richard Rhodes, historian, put deaths at over 100,000, injuries at a million and homeless residents at a million.[

You are a nut case indeed.

Oh, yeah?

Nice of you to remind me so..

we can read and write and have been at least exposed to culture.

Most of us have the resources and time to travel to most of the world. We have all the ideas of the world at our fingertips.
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Yes we can read and write, so could many long before us and if they could not read and write they could tell stories, stories which were carried on for generations.
Do you really think people were not exposed to culture long ago?
Everybody has and has had culture, maybe not what you think about as culture, Just think about the Chineese, the Egyptians, the Greek, the Africans, the Native Americans, we in Europe had it too.
That we have resources and time to travel most of the world does not mean we really seriously know so much about other countries.
People travelled a lot in their known world and sometimes also farther than that.
Boats sailed, pilgrims walked from Norway to Rome and Spain, craftsmen often spent years in other countries to learn more, tradesmen travelled to buy and sell.
Do you know where the expression comes from:" A brooken mirror means seven years of sorrow"? It really comes from the middle ages when it took years or a long time to go from Sweden to Venice, Italy to get a new one. In case it broke on route the tradesman had to go back and get a new one.
A game of chess, probably from the far East has been found on Greenland, which shows the travels of Vikings.
Do you realize that allready in the middle ages spices came from the far East to Europe, that we had rice allready in 14-1500 hundreds in Sweden?
Often the small country churches - just to mention something - were painted inside with the whole biblical history for people who could not read.
Included were many symbols, which a modern person does not understand, but people knew what meant earlier.
People had many more "holy days" and knew why they were celebrated.
People had traditions and knew about them. Many traditions are still celebrated but people have forgotten why.
People have music, dances, songs, food and cloth all part of their area and it is all part of culture.
Or do you find jeans and T-shirts more of culture than the national customs?

Saab,

I am not talking about the life of the richest few (for whom your comments might apply-- then again they might not). I am talking about life for the normal person.

Obviously everyone has access to their own culture. What I am talking about is access to world cultures and different ideas.

It wasn't that long ago that the great majority of people (i.e. not the wealthy few) were illiterate and never traveled. This means that you simply don't have access to any ideas outside of your little circle.

In past times, the common person knew scant little about anything outside of their own village (excepting of course what they could learn from paintings in their church).

I was not talking about the richest few. I was talking about normal people
Sailors were not rich, pilgrims were as a r ule not rich the cloisters took them in, craftsmen were not rich, they worked for a small amount of money, food and some place to sleep, tradesmen were not that rich either.
I am sure all these people moving around in Europe and the far East and sometimes to Africa learnt about the countries and came home and told a lot of things. Travelling slowly as they did, they might even have learnt more about a country than we do with our Europe on 8 days.

If you talk about not long ago people did not travel - we only need to go to just before WWII, but at that time people were reading a lot about other countries.
I know people who never travelled, but read about, read the authors from and tried to cook the food from a new country every winter.

We should not make the people from other times more ignorant than they were.
I think it is much more a shame that today with all the possibilities we have people are so ignorant as they are.

When people in Europe start talking about how ignorant the Americans are about Europe I ask one question. "Do you know how many countries there are in Europe - not EU - but Europe?" So far I have met 2 people who knew.
Even the politicians talk about Europe when they mean EU.

Can you tell them all? Do you know all their capitals? I didn't meet a single person who knew..

Ignorance is quite relative..

I know there are around 45,
I don´t know the name of all of them now when UdSSR and Yugoslavia divided up and naturally I don´t know the capitals of all of them either. At least I know the majority of them.
Most people think are around 20 even thou there are 27 in EU

PS I am European and not American, so I talk about Europeans and not Amerians.
I suppose most Americans know how many states you have in USA

Come on Saab! You say "All these people" to mean a very small percentage of people.

Let's ask the question another way.

Did the invention of the printing press, where books were suddenly affordable, could as major improvement or not. (Before this point, any single book would cost more than the average person made in a year).

What about the advent of machinery? Before this, most people were working on farms and in crafts guilds with no time or money to travel or get an education.

What about the ability to travel... The idea that a working person can travel to another country for a fraction of their income is very recent advancement-- and the idea that you could go overseas for a couple of weeks is amazing.

Do you really think many people now (or then) would be able to take a few months off of work to see another country at the cost of a years salary?

Do you really think that the ability to read doesn't matter?

We have a near universal literacy rate in developed countries. We have the ability to cross oceans in hours at a cost that amounts to a couple of days of pay. We can buy books for less then an hour of work on pretty much any topic. Almost all of us are educated in reading, writing, science and literature by the time we reach adulthood.

All of these things are not only important for our quality of life--- they are amazing advancements compared with most of human history.