We Should be Dead by Now

I believe Old Dog is right about that life expectancy thing.  I seem to remember hearing, when I was a little kid, that life expectancy for Americans was about 70.  By that standard, all three of us should be dead by now.

Before we can decide if the cave man's life was better than ours, we need to define "better".  Those guys didn't have all the stuff we have today but, having never had it, they wouldn't have missed it.  When my mother was a teenager, she was moping around the house as teenagers are wont to do. When her Czech immigrant father asked her what was wrong, she told him that she was depressed.  Grandpa didn't know the meaning of that word, so he looked it up in his English/Czech dictionary, but he didn't know the meaning of the Czech equivalent of "depressed" either.  Mom explained to him that it meant that she wasn't feeling good.  Grandpa asked his daughter if she was sick, hungry, cold, or in pain.  Mom said "no" to all of that.  Grandpa: "You've got a roof over your head, food in your belly, and clothes on your back. What the hell do you have to be depressed about?" By that standard, our caveman must have been happy most of the time.

Archaeological digs around nearby Mackinaw City have uncovered artifacts that date human habitation in the region back some 10,000 years, about the time the glaciers went away.  The levels of the Great Lakes were higher then, so Beaglesonia would probably have been underwater.  Even now, if you dig down two or three feet around here, you hit the water table, and that's on the high ground.  If there are any artifacts under there, you wouldn't be able to dig them up with a shovel, you would need a drudge or something.

As I understand it, most of the people that are getting their security clearances cancelled by Trump are former government agents.  Why would somebody like that even need a security clearance?  It seem like their clearances should have been cancelled when they left their government jobs.  That's probably not why Trump is doing it, but I'm just saying.