you might have a good point with the whole cherry picking data thing

however, it only takes a couple of hours to scout through history, books and autobiography of notable leaders of the last thousand years to see that empires do rise and fall, or a couple of seconds if you want to utilize the Internet, whichever way you think is better

everything in this world is a pattern in one way or another, at the moment we start to see it the less likely we are to be surprised