What Hath God Wrought?

"In a demonstration witnessed by members of Congress, American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse dispatches a telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland. The message–“What Hath God Wrought?”–was telegraphed back to the Capitol a moment later by Vail. The question, taken from the Bible (Numbers 23:23)."

By Rich Kozlovich

My friend Maury Siskel sent me an e-mail he titles "Staggering Statistics", outlining how much humanity has advanced in so many fields over the last century and less. Let's start with computers, science, technology and the exploding expansion of knowledge.

The Wright brothers took their first flight in 1903. In a span of 66 years we went from taking flight to landing on the moon in 1969. In the next 47 years mankind was able to develop computer science to the point there's more processing power in a TI-83 calculator than in the computer that landed the Apollo 11 on the moon.

In 1990, one million people worldwide owned a mobile phone.  If you bought the computing power found inside an iPhone 5S in 1991, it would have cost you 3.56 million dollars.  Today there are between five and six billion personal cell phones in circulation.   On the Internet, there's 1.2 Zettabytes (1.3 trillion gigabytes of data. That amounts to 75 billion fully-loaded 16GB iPads. If you stack them, they'd reaching 339 miles into the sky. That amount grew 63 percent in 2009 alone. All the functions of all the gadgets in a 1991 full page RadioShack ad exists in a single smart phone.

A computer hard drive 32 years ago would have weighed 26 pounds and stored a "massive" 20 MB of data. The modern memory card is 23,000 times lighter and stores 3,200 times the amount of data.

Humans will create more information in the form of data in the next two days than was created in all of history up until the year 2003. If all the information on Wikipedia, started in 2001, were printed without images, it would consist of 2053 volumes. Encyclopedia Britannica, started in 1768, has 32 volumes, and no human has won a chess tournament against a high-spec computer since 2005.

What has been the practical value of all that exploding knowledge? Let's delve into the human equation. 

Between 1990 and 2013 maternal mortality dropped almost 50%.  But the figures are even more impressive when compared to the rate in 1903, which were staggeringly high, especially due to infection.

Between 1990 and 2010, measles deaths declined by 71%, saving 1,000,000 lives every years with the measles vaccine. There was a time when homes were quarantined for measles because measles is highly contagious. Measles is spread by air and any un-vaccinated person exposed to an infected person, even for just a brief minute of two, can contract the disease. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known to man. "On average, if you have 10 susceptible individuals exposed to a measles patient, 9 will end up getting sick."

So much for the irrational claims by the anti-vaccination crowd.

Agricultural advances have been amazing, especially by the work of Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution. A man I refer to as Borlaug the Great.  Based on how many lives he saved from starvation - potentially over one billion -he may have been the greatest man to live in the 20th or 21st centuries. Since 1961 the amount of food we produce has increased by 25%.  Around 2% of the population now produce enough food to fill the bellies of every single person on the Earth with 2800 calories per day, and that can only be accomplished with modern agricultural technology, including genetically modified foods, the latest modern agricultural miracle. 1950 the average life expectancy was 47 years.  Today it's 70.

So much for the claims by the organic farming crowd.

There's a reason why the world's population rose from 2 billion people at the end of WWII to 7 billion today, with more living longer healthier lives.  Modern technology!   The very thing environmental activists constantly condemn claiming technology has harmed humanity almost beyond recovery, and we're worse off than when we were "one with nature".  That all sounds all so romantic, but those who were "one with nature" worked diligently to create a separation between themselves and nature in order to survive.  If being one with nature was so wonderful why did anyone do anything to change it?

With all these wonders at our disposal why aren't we happy?  Why is there so much whining?  Why is there so much hate and discontent? Why is everything such a mess?  The world's economy is on the verge of bankruptcy, religious fanatics are butchering, raping and brutalizing people all over the planet.  Activists of every ilk are rioting, looting, burning and doing everything in their power to destroy the stable societies that weaned them.  Worse yet, many of the leaders in these nations who have embraced leftist morality, not only support them, they encourage it.

Let's try and get this once and for all. The west - for all it's current and historical flaws - was built on Judaic/Christian principles giving the west the only stable moral foundation the world has ever known. John Adams correctly identified this problem when he said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  The religious people he was talking about were those who embraces Judaic/Christian ethic.  It never occured to the founding fathers an enlightened society would embrace any other. 

We're no longer that moral or religious people. We have abandoned Judaic/Christian ethics. As a result we have no moral foundation on which to firmly stand.  Society as a result is being washed back and forth like the waves crashing against the rocks by every new philosophical flavor of the day.

What we need is clarity. 

Leftism has only one moral foundation that's universal to all leftists of every ilk.  Say or do anything that will get them the power they so desperately crave!  And they will sacrifice millions to get it.  These activists are nothing more than the cat's paws of leftist elites who would destroy the whole world to gain power for one day. 

Leftists are not only irrational, misanthropic and morally defective - they must be insane - because historically we know leftism has been a failure everywhere in the world it's been imposed, and yet society embraces it as if it's something new, shining and wonderful, even though history condemns it for promising utopia, while delivering dystopia - squalor, human misery, suffering, disease, early death, and mass executions in it's wake.  That's historically incontestable, and yet so many embrace it. 

We have truly have lost our minds!