Declining Health Quotes

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.

Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care.

Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body's powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years. ... Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth.

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.

I speak as a planetary physician whose patient, the living Earth, complains of fever; I see the Earth's declining health as our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy Earth. Our concern for it must come first, because the welfare of the burgeoning mass of humanity demands a healthy planet.

American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any other country—but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in certain years life expectancy actually declines.

The most important possession of a country is its population. If this is maintained in health and vigour everything else will follow; if this is allowed to decline nothing, not even great riches, can save the country from eventual ruin.

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render.

Regardless of our assessment of Elimelech, Naomi lost her husband. On the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, loss of a spouse is the worst event on the human suffering scale. Combine that with a widow’s already declining health and diminishing senses, Naomi’s state of mind must have been a personal cataclysm. Michael Ben Zehabe, Ruth: a woman’s guide to husband material, pg 8

Traditional progressive bread and butter economic issues are the heart of the solution. It's about ensuring decent jobs with a good wage. It's about ensuring a free public education in all the communities of America, whether they are in the shiny new affluent suburbs or the crumbling old schools of the older suburbs and cities. It's about ensuring a system where all Americans have access to health care, instead of a steadily declining share of our population.

Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights. Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

I'm a queen with or without a king. Chasing anything is beneath me. Until you're ready to put away childish things and be my man, my king, someone I can trust to shepard my soul to the Almighty I have to decline being your wife. I love you with all my heart and soul, but my salvation, life, health, and legacy has to come first now.

Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts—as was the case among the Indians and appears to be the case amongst us 'modern men' and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual preference for the hard, gruesome, malevolent and problematic aspects of existence which comes from a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence? Is there perhaps such a thing as suffering from superabundance itself? Is there a tempting bravery in the sharpest eye which demands the terrifying as its foe, as a worthy foe against which it can test its strength and from which it intends to learn the meaning of fear?

Dietary fat was singled out as the most villainous culprit responsible for weight gain and declining health. The food industry adjusted by replacing saturated animal fats with “heart healthy,” super-processed vegetable seed oils, and high fructose corn syrup. Soon, our average body weight started to rise, and it did so quickly.

Dedication is a great trait. It’s also the trait most abused by superiors. In short, you are an asset that can be easily replaced. Your proficiency is profitable to the company and makes life easier for supervisors. But the constant imbalance may result in a divorce or decline in health. Is that what you agreed to when you were hired?

My hints had, undoubtedly and unintentionally, made her feel insecure, guilty, inadequate, afraid that she was losing whatever it was that turned me on; in short, it aroused all the self-doubt so readily awakened in women after thousands of years of servitude. Hence my zeal in denying the effects of time was abetted by Laura's complicity.

Please don’t blame someone when their mental health declines. It can be tough to judge when one is deteriorating, even after collapsing thousands of times. Signs of decline are not always imminent. Most importantly, please don’t make a person who tried to commit suicide feel bad or guilty. Trust me, they already feel like the scum of the earth.

No food is a more powerful trigger of neurological issues and autoimmunity than gluten, the protein found in wheat.

You know, I always erase everything... And lately, my memory loss is erasing what time hasn't.

super-agers tend to have stronger social networks on average than people whose cognitive performance declines normally.

People only know what you say “Yes” to – they don’t see all the activities you declined, and the tough choices you made.

Philip was brave, but the statesman predominated in his character; he was soon weary of sacrificing his health and interest on a barren coast:

years, according to my wish, "of health, of leisure,

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

Well, let's consider the value of the dollar. Ultimately, logically, the dollar has no value at all. It's a piece of paper. It only has value because we say it has value, and because we agree on a system of bartering that maintains that value. Great care is taken to keep the value of the dollar strong. Smart guys in Washington and New York lose sleep over this. And we all watched what happend in Argentina a few years ago. We watched what happened when the value of currency declined rapidly. It's not a good thing. Sex is like that. God is concerned with the value of sex staying high. It's important to a person's health, a family's health, and a society's health. But like anything, sex can be cheapened in our minds, so we don't hold it in high esteem. God doesn't think this is a good thing. Stuff God doesn't think is good is called sin. "What happens when sex is cheaped?" somebody asked. A lot happens. The main thing is there is no sacred physical territory associated with commitment. There can still be emotional territory, but there isn't anything physical, experiential, that a man and a woman have only with each other. Sleeping around does something to the heart, to the mind. It leaves less commodity to spend on a sacred mate. But all of that sounds pretty fluffy. Let me break it down into practical stuff. Women saying no to men, not letting men have sex with them, causes men to step up. If, in order to have sex with them, women demanded you got a job and shaved every day and didn't dress like a dork or sit around playing video games, then all of us would do just that. We all want to have sex, right? ... And this in turn would be good for families, would be good for the communities.

Beginning in early adulthood, dopamine levels, which affect both physical movement and reward-motivated behavior (in addition to a bunch of other things), decline by about 10 percent every decade.

I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward's health had anything to do with this, and I don't say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him 'on his deathbed.' He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of 'Orientalism' in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward's revised edition, I decided I'd suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to. Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as 'racist.' The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice... I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that's 'it' as it were. I didn't say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. 'Racist' is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn't go to, and wasn't invited to, his funeral.

Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September 1913. They were advised against having children because of Virginia’s recurring depressive illness, a cause of some regret to her, and a point of much heated debate among her later biographers.

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies,” Binyamin Appelbaum writes, “is that the average American’s life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.

The reason why education pays off is because of something called cognitive reserve: people with extra brain power (thanks in part to extra education) can afford to lose more before showing obvious signs of decline. That’s why two people who have brains that look exactly alike—with the same amount of shrinkage—can nevertheless show dramatic differences in how long they remain cognitively healthy. Those who put their brains to better use can withstand greater loss of brain matter.

Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze told Politico, in a story about his work headlined “The Great Nutrient Collapse.” “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history—[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.” Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third. The problem has gotten worse as carbon concentrations have gotten worse. Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse, since so many of the world’s poor depend on crops, rather than animal meat, for protein; 138 million could suffer from a deficiency of zinc, essential to healthy pregnancies; and 1.4 billion could face a dramatic decline in dietary iron—pointing to a possible epidemic of anemia. In 2018, a team led by Chunwu Zhu looked at the protein content of eighteen different strains of rice, the staple crop for more than 2 billion people, and found that more carbon dioxide in the air produced nutritional declines across the board—drops in protein content, as well as in iron, zinc, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9. Really everything but vitamin E. Overall, the researchers found that, acting just through that single crop, rice, carbon emissions could imperil the health of 600 million people. In previous centuries, empires were built on that crop. Climate change promises another, an empire of hunger, erected among the world’s poor.

Many of the Chinese medical texts dating back from 2,000 years ago lament the ills of 'modern times' and allude to the traditional 'good old days' another 3,000 years before that. A common theme in these texts is the decline in human health due to careless lifestyles and the deterioration in human relations due to lack of love: degenerative conditions that Taoist alchemy as well as psychoneuroimmunology would link as symptoms of the same syndrome. In his essay entitled 'Loving People' Chang San-feng, the thirteenth-century master, summed it up by saying: 'Therefore to those who want to know the way to deal with the world, I suggest, Love People.' This is a potent description for health and longevity that generates positive healing energy throughout the human system by stimulating the internal alchemy of psychoneuroimmunology.

WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE HEART IS GOOD FOR THE BRAIN. That is, vascular health (meaning low apoB, low inflammation, and low oxidative stress) is crucial to brain health. WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE LIVER (AND PANCREAS) IS GOOD FOR THE BRAIN. Metabolic health is crucial to brain health. TIME IS KEY. We need to think about prevention early, and the more the deck is stacked against you genetically, the harder you need to work and the sooner you need to start. As with cardiovascular disease, we need to play a very long game. OUR MOST POWERFUL TOOL FOR PREVENTING COGNITIVE DECLINE IS EXERCISE. We’ve talked a lot about diet and metabolism, but exercise appears to act in multiple ways (vascular, metabolic) to preserve brain health; we’ll get into more detail in Part III, but exercise—lots of it—is a foundation of our Alzheimer’s-prevention program.

In August 1902, Olivia’s health grew alarmingly worse. Despite temporary improvements, it continued to decline, and in 1903, on the recommendation of her doctors, Clemens decided to take the family to Italy. In early November they settled into the Villa di Quarto near Florence. In addition to Clemens himself, the travelers included Olivia, Clara, and Jean. Three employees were also with them: longtime family servant Katy Leary, a nurse for Olivia, and Isabel V. Lyon, who had been hired in 1902 as Olivia’s secretary but had since assumed more general duties.

It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother's face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again...

The utility of money changes over time, and it does so in a fairly predictable way: Starting sometime in your twenties, your health very subtly starts to decline, causing a corresponding decline in your ability to enjoy money. Ability to Enjoy Experiences Based on Health Everyone's health declines with age. Wealth, on the other hand, tends to grow over the years as people save up more and more. But worsening health gradually constrains your enjoyment of that wealth as more and more physical activities become impossible to enjoy, no matter how much money you can afford to spend on them.

You get used to it. And that surprises me. You get used to diminishment, to a body that is stalled, an impediment? Well, yes, you do. An alter ego is amazed, aghast perhaps--myself in the roaring forties, when robust health was an assumption, a given, something you barely noticed because it was always there. Acceptance has set in, somehow, has crept up on you, which is just as well, because the alternative--perpetual rage and resentment--would not help matters. You are now this other person, your earlier selves are out there, familiar, well remembered, but you have to come to terms with a different incarnation.

Forget for a moment that we know Hitler to be a monster.4 Remember that he was for years one of the most exciting forces to arise in modern European history, and that he appeared to millions as a figure of hope. Following the First World War, his country was in the throes of steep decline, and he was returning it to order and health.

Loss of sensory functions, in particular due to difficulties seeing and hearing. Studies have shown that age-related hearing loss is directly associated with cognitive decline, in part because the area of the brain that is supposed to be dedicated to higher-level cognition is instead forced to struggle to interpret diminished sounds.

Man's consciously lived fragility, individuality and relatedness make the experience of pain, of sickness and of death an integral part of his life. The ability to cope with this trio autonomously is fundamental to his health. As he becomes dependent on the management of his intimacy, he renounces his autonomy and his health must decline.

The transformation of a gilded playboy into a multinational titan did not surprise me. Age does not affect the taste for trophies, and flagging physical vigor is often compensated for by a fresh psychological drive. [...] In his fifties, a man’s virility often goes into action to build up a capital of power as a shelter against glandular decline.

As we have learned more and more about the brain and how it generates complex behaviours, U.S. psychiatry remains wedded to a diagnostic and treatment system over 60 years old: identify a few clinical features that match a diagnostic label in the DSM and then apply the treatments that are said to work for the category of the patient. It Is a cookbook diagnosis and treatment. Without thought, labels are applied and drugs with significant side effects but with only the modest efficiency are prescribed. Various brands of psychotherapy are offered with little consideration of what actually helps and which patients are best suited to a particular brand. This is twenty-first century U.S. psychiatry. As a field in my view ignored the oath to first, do no harm.

The longevity genes I work on are called “sirtuins,” named after the yeast SIR2 gene, the first one to be discovered. There are seven sirtuins in mammals, SIRT1 to SIRT7, and they are made by almost every cell in the body. When I started my research, sirtuins were barely on the scientific radar. Now this family of genes is at the forefront of medical research and drug development. Descended from gene B in M. superstes, sirtuins are enzymes that remove acetyl tags from histones and other proteins and, by doing so, change the packaging of the DNA, turning genes off and on when needed. These critical epigenetic regulators sit at the very top of cellular control systems, controlling our reproduction and our DNA repair. After a few billion years of advancement since the days of yeast, they have evolved to control our health, our fitness, and our very survival. They have also evolved to require a molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD. As we will see later, the loss of NAD as we age, and the resulting decline in sirtuin activity, is thought to be a primary reason our bodies develop diseases when we are old but not when we are young.

Make America Great Again”—ripped off from Ronald Reagan, and traced the decline of the country to the mid-1960s. Though he didn’t mention the Johnson era’s Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, or public subsidies for housing and health care, Trump’s dog whistle was just the right pitch to attract the support of white supremacists and nearly all-white crowds of thousands at his campaign rallies.

Eliminate simple carbohydrates—sugar, candy, cookies, muffins, cakes, breads, pasta, crackers, white potatoes, grains, soft drinks (both regular and diet, since artificial sweeteners disrupt your gut health), fruit juices, alcohol, processed foods, and anything with high-fructose corn syrup. As you limit your intake of simple carbohydrates, you’ll be surprised to find that you fairly quickly lose your desire for sweet-tasting food.

We do not consider the many causes of weight loss. We don’t remember troubling weight loss is sometimes prompted by grief from a breakup, divorce, or death. We don’t think about weight loss caused by cancer or chemotherapy. We don’t consider that the person in front of us might be going through a medical crisis, their weight loss a sign of abrupt and troubling change rather than hard-fought victory. And we don’t consider that weight loss is sometimes linked to declining mental health or a new wave of disordered eating. In our eagerness to compliment what we assume is desired weight loss, many of us end up congratulating restrictive eating disorders, grief, and trauma in the process, revealing that we are in a constant state of surveillance, monitoring and assessing the bodies of those around us. We keep our disappointment and displeasure quiet, revealing our disapproval of fatness only in our celebration of thinness.

Episodic Memory is your recollection of events. Where did you go to kindergarten? When did you first meet your spouse? What did you eat for breakfast yesterday? And where did you leave the keys? This is the one that tends to naturally weaken with age. In fact, episodic memory peaks in your midtwenties and then slowly declines throughout life. That’s why you still remember the words to songs from when you were a teenager but barely remember the plot of a movie you saw last year.

Contrary to the earlier belief that a steady heart rate was an indicator of health, we now know that a loss of the naturally occurring variability in heart rate is actually a sign of disease and a strong predictor of future health problems. [23] Because heart rate variability declines as we get older, it’s one way to measure our physiological aging. [24] In essence, HRV is a measure of the flexibility of our heart and nervous system, and as such reflects our health and fitness.

Six out of ten adults are living with a chronic illness. About 50 percent of Americans will deal with mental illness sometime in life. Seventy-four percent of adults are overweight or have obesity. Rates of cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, upper respiratory infections, and autoimmune conditions are all going up at the exact time we are spending more and more to treat them. In the face of these trends, American life expectancy has been declining for the most sustained period since 1860.

The Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay diet—or MIND diet, for short—was specially designed to improve brain health. Recent well-done studies have found that sticking to the MIND diet helps people avoid mental decline and remain cognitively healthy. One study even showed that people who stuck to the MIND diet cut their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in half. That’s extraordinary. And since no drug has yet been developed to prevent dementia, it’s your only move.

And from mayors to average citizens, we have heard expressed a shared belief in a direct causal relationship between the character of the physical environment and the social health of families and the community at large. For all of the household conveniences, cars, and shopping malls, life seems less satisfying to most Americans, particularly in the ubiquitous middle-class suburbs, where a sprawling, repetitive, and forgettable landscape has supplanted the original promise of suburban life with a hollow imitation.

At the beginning of a relationship with a covert narcissist, you feel incredibly valued. Then you begin to experience little things, statements they make, looks they give that begin to demean and devalue you. It is all very subtle. Over a long period of time, you are given the message by someone you love and trust that you have no value, no matter what you do, no matter how kind you are, no matter how much you do for them, you will never ever be enough for them. The cold, hard truth is you do not matter to them, and unfortunately, the message you end up receiving is that you do not matter, period. The confusing thing is that while you are being devalued, you are also experiencing kindness. You receive beautiful love letters, affection, and loving gestures. You continue to believe this is a good relationship, and your partner loves you. You tell everyone around you how lucky you are to have the partner you do because you sincerely believe that. Your friends tell you they wish their husband/wife/partner was more like yours. However, though you are saying all of these things, you don’t notice your self-image and self-worth slowly declining over time. Through the years, you notice your health isn’t great, you feel depressed, you aren’t that happy, but you contribute these things to other things in life or blame yourself. The way your CN partner treats you goes unnoticed because it has become your normal. You don’t notice the consistent devaluing because it is so subtle. You don’t realize how you feel is a result of the trauma of living with an abuser.

The upshot was a taboo in Western moral codes and legal systems on taking an identifiable human life: one could not deliberate on the value of the life of an individual in one’s midst. (Exceptions were exuberantly made, of course, for heretics, infidels, uncivilized tribes, enemy peoples, and transgressors of any of several hundred laws. And we continue to deliberate on the value of statistical lives, as opposed to identifiable lives, every time we send soldiers or police into harm’s way, or scrimp on expensive health and safety measures.)

Hundreds of studies have shown that people overrate their health, leadership ability, intelligence, professional competence, sporting prowess, and managerial skills. People also hold the nonsensical belief that they are inherently lucky. Most people think they are more likely than the average person to attain a good first job, to have gifted children, and to live to a ripe old age. They also think that they are less likely than the average person to be the victim of an accident, crime, disease, depression, unwanted pregnancy, or earthquake. Why

The increase in deaths of despair was almost all among those without a bachelor’s degree. Those with a four-year degree are mostly exempt; it is those without the degree who are at risk. This was particularly surprising for suicide; for more than a century, suicides were generally more common among the educated,1 but that is not true in the current epidemic of deaths of despair. The four-year college degree is increasingly dividing America, and the extraordinarily beneficial effects of the degree are a constant theme running through the book. The widening gap between those with and without a bachelor’s degree is not only in death but also in quality of life; those without a degree are seeing increases in their levels of pain, ill health, and serious mental distress, and declines in their ability to work and to socialize. The gap is also widening in earnings, in family stability, and in community.2 A four-year degree has become the key marker of social status, as if there were a requirement for nongraduates to wear a circular scarlet badge bearing the letters BA crossed through by a diagonal red line.

I shall be told by the zealots of the sect of regulation that this may be true, and may be safely committed to the convention of the farmer and the labourer, when the latter is in the prime of his youth, and at the time of his health and vigour, and in ordinary times of abundance. But in calamitous seasons, under accidental illness, in declining life, and with the pressure of a numerous offspring, the future nourishers of the community but the present drains and blood-suckers of those who produce them, what is to be done? [Thoughts and Details on Scarcity]

Or take historians, the quintessential assemblers of existing facts and ideas. Weirdly, they fall way out of the typical range for decline, peaking 39.7 years after career inception, on average. Think what this implies: Say you intend to pursue a career as a professional historian and finish your PhD at thirty-two. The bad news is that in your fifties, you are still pretty wet behind the ears. But here’s the good news: at age seventy-two, you still have half your work to go! Better take care of your health so you can write your best books into your eighties.

There is little doubt, Denmark is becoming a two-tier country. More and more Danes who can afford it are turning to private health care—850,000 at the latest count—and poll after poll shows that, though they have the largest per capita public sector in the world, the Danes’ satisfaction levels with their welfare state are in rapid decline. It is probably true that they have especially high expectations given the amount of money they contribute to it, but in one survey by management consultants Accenture only 22 percent of Danes thought their public sector did a good job.

The Number of Hours You Sleep Each Night—One of the fastest ways to hurt your brain is to get fewer than seven or eight hours of sleep at night. People who typically get six hours or fewer of sleep have lower overall blood flow to the brain, which hurts its function. Researchers from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the University of Pennsylvania found that chronically getting fewer than eight hours of sleep was associated with cognitive decline. Strive to get at least seven or eight hours of sleep a night. There are hypnosis audios on the Amen Solution @ Home.

The alt-right’s small gains in popularity will not be enough to win Trump the election. This is not Germany in the 1930s. All that’s changed is that one of Alex’s fans — one of those grumpy looking middle-aged men sitting in David Icke’s audience — is now the Republican nominee. But if some disaster unfolds — if Hillary’s health declines further, or she grows ever more off-puttingly secretive — and Trump gets elected, he could bring Alex and the others with him. The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us — that is terrifying. THE

Their sisters have no earthly employment but household work and sewing, no earthly pleasure but an unprofitable visiting, and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health. They are never well, and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great wish, the sole aim of every one of them is to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will die as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule; they don’t want them; they hold them very cheap.

I don’t know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

This is another area where my thinking has changed over time. I used to prioritize nutrition over everything else, but I now consider exercise to be the most potent longevity “drug” in our arsenal, in terms of lifespan and healthspan. The data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline, better than any other intervention. We also tend to feel better when we exercise, so it probably has some harder-to-measure effect on emotional health as well. My hope is that you will understand not only the how but the why of various types of exercise, so you will be able to formulate a program that fits your own personal goals.

Mason bleakly exhales. “No Hell, then?” “Not inside the Earth, anyway.” “Nor any . . . Single Administrator of Evil.” “They did introduce me to some Functionary,— no telling,— We chatted, others came in. They ask’d if I’d take off as much of my Clothing as I’d feel comfortable with,— I stepp’d out of my Shoes, left my Hat on . . . ? They walk’d ’round me in Circles, now and then poking at me . . . ? Nothing too intrusive.” “Nothing you remember, anyway,” Mason can’t help putting in. “They peer’d into my Eyes and Ears, they look’d in my Mouth, they put me upon a Balance and weigh’d me. They conferr’d. ‘Are you quite sure, now,’ the Personage ask’d me at last, ‘that you wish to bet ev’ry-thing upon the Body?— this Body?— moreover, to rely helplessly upon the Daily Harvest your Sensorium brings in,— keeping in mind that both will decline, the one in Health as the other in Variety, growing less and less trustworthy till at last they are no more?’ Eeh. Well, what would thoo’ve said?” “So, did you— ” “We left it in abeyance. Arriv’d back at the Observatory, it seem’d but minutes, this time, in Transit, I sought my Bible, which I let fall open, and read, in Job, 26:5 through 7, ‘Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof. “ ‘Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering. “ ‘He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

Almost a year after the start of the corona crisis, how is the mental health of the population? MD: For the time being, there are few figures that show the evolution of possible indicators such as the intake of antidepressants and anxiolytics or the number of suicides. But it is especially important to place mental well-being in the corona crisis in its historical continuity. Mental health had been declining for decades. There has long been a steady increase in the number of depression and anxiety problems and the number of suicides. And in recent years there has been an enormous growth in absenteeism due to psychological suffering and burnouts. The year before the corona outbreak, you could feel this malaise growing exponentially. This gave the impression that society was heading for a tipping point where a psychological 'reorganization' of the social system was imperative. This is happening with corona. Initially, we noticed people with little knowledge of the virus conjure up terrible fears, and a real social panic reaction became manifested. This happens especially if there is already a strong latent fear in a person or population. The psychological dimensions of the current corona crisis are seriously underestimated. A crisis acts as a trauma that takes away an individual's historical sense. The trauma is seen as an isolated event in itself, when in fact it is part of a continuous process. For example, we easily overlook the fact that a significant portion of the population was strangely relieved during the initial lockdown, feeling liberated from stress and anxiety. I regularly heard people say: "Yes these measures are heavy-handed, but at least I can relax a bit." Because the grind of daily life stopped, a calm settled over society. The lockdown often freed people from a psychological rut. This created unconscious support for the lockdown. If the population had not already been exhausted by their life, and especially their jobs, there would never have been support for the lockdown. At least not as a response to a pandemic that is not too bad compared to the major pandemics of the past. You noticed something similar when the first lockdown came to an end. You then regularly heard statements such as "We are not going to start living again like we used to, get stuck in traffic again" and so on. People did not want to go back to the pre-corona normal. If we do not take into account the population's dissatisfaction with its existence, we will not understand this crisis and we will not be able to resolve it. By the way, I now have the impression that the new normal has become a rut again, and I would not be surprised if mental health really starts to deteriorate in the near future. Perhaps especially if it turns out that the vaccine does not provide the magical solution that is expected from it.

Against this backdrop, the celebration that erupted among many—including me—when the Cold War reached its end has dissipated. In 2017, The Economist’s Democracy Index showed a decline in democratic health in seventy countries, using such criteria as respect for due process, religious liberty, and the space given to civil society. Among the nations scoring less well was the United States, which for the first time was rated a “flawed democracy,” not a “full” one. The analysts didn’t blame Donald Trump for this fall from grace but rather attributed his election to Americans’ loss of confidence in their institutions. “Popular trust in government, elected representatives, and political parties has fallen to extremely low levels,” the report concluded, adding, “This has been a long-term trend.” The number of Americans who say that they have faith in their government “just about always” or “most of the time” dropped from above 70 percent in the early 1960s to below 20 percent in 2016. Yes, there continue to be gains. In Africa, forty heads of state have relinquished power voluntarily in the past quarter century, compared with a mere handful in the three decades prior to that. However, progress there and in a select number of other countries has failed to obscure a more general leveling-off. Today, about half the nations on earth can be considered democracies—flawed or otherwise—while the remaining 50 percent tend toward authoritarianism.

I think the more accurate answer as to why Trump has won working-class support lies in the pain, desperation, and political alienation that millions of working-class Americans now experience and the degree to which the Democratic Party has abandoned them for wealthy campaign contributors and the “beautiful people.” These are Americans who, while the rich get much richer, have seen their real wages stagnate and their good union jobs go to China and Mexico. They can’t afford health care, they can’t afford childcare, they can’t afford to send their kids to college and are scared to death about a retirement with inadequate income. Because of what doctors call “diseases of despair,” their communities are even seeing a decline in life expectancy.

In country after country where local moneys were abolished in favor of interest-bearing central currency, people fell into poverty, health declined, and society deteriorated12 by all measures. Even the plague can be traced to the collapse of the marketplace of the late Middle Ages and the shift toward extractive currencies and urban wage labor. The new scheme instead favored bigger players, such as chartered monopolies, which had better access to capital than regular little businesses and more means of paying back the interest. When monarchs and their favored merchants founded the first corporations, the idea that they would be obligated to grow didn’t look like such a problem. They had their nations’ governments and armies on their side—usually as direct investors in their projects. For the Dutch East India Company to grow was as simple as sending a few warships to a new region of the world, taking the land, and enslaving its people. If this sounds a bit like the borrowing advantages enjoyed today by companies like Walmart and Amazon, that’s because it’s essentially the same money system in operation, favoring the same sorts of players. Yet however powerful the favored corporations may appear, they are really just the engines through which the larger money system extracts value from everyone’s economic activity. Even megacorporations are like competing apps on a universally accepted, barely acknowledged smartphone operating system. Their own survival is utterly dependent on their ability to grow capital for their debtors and investors.

After a decent resistance, the crafty tyrant submitted to the orders of the senate; and consented to receive the government of the provinces, and the general command of the Roman armies, under the well-known names of PROCONSUL and IMPERATOR.5 But he would receive them only for ten years. Even before the expiration of that period, he hoped that the wounds of civil discord would be completely healed, and that the republic, restored to its pristine health and vigour, would no longer require the dangerous interposition of so extraordinary a magistrate. The memory of this comedy, repeated several times during the life of Augustus, was preserved to the last ages of the empire, by the peculiar pomp with which the perpetual monarchs of Rome always solemnized the tenth years of their reign.

In human studies, black cohosh has been found to decrease hot flashes associated with menopause. Unlike conventional estrogen effects on individuals predisposed to breast cancer, black cohosh has been shown in laboratory studies to inhibit cancer cells. Most studies used doses of 20–80 mg twice daily, providing 4–8 mg triterpene glycosides for up to six months. Melatonin—This hormone is produced in the pineal gland that, among other functions, helps sleep. Melatonin levels decline with age and may lead to the sleep disturbances common during menopause. Melatonin has been shown in laboratory studies to inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells. Melatonin acts as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant in the brain and other tissues like the intestine. Studies show that low melatonin levels increase breast cancer risk in women. So if you are having trouble sleeping consider 3–6 mg of melatonin before bed. It may boost your immune system and help you sleep.

The history of HRT use dates back to 1966 and the success of Dr. Robert Wilson’s best-selling book Feminine Forever, which he promoted vigorously. The premise of the book was that it was as natural and necessary for a menopausal woman to replace estrogen as it was for a diabetic to replace insulin. Dr. Wilson preached that doing so would keep a woman young, healthy, and attractive. He went so far as to declare that the lack of eggs and decline of reproductive hormones in a menopausal woman was a “galloping catastrophe”5 that could only be averted by taking estrogen supplements. He explained that with estrogen supplements, “Breasts and genital organs will not shrivel. Such women will be much more pleasant to live with and will not become dull and unattractive.” According to Dr. Wilson’s son, Ronald, all of his father’s expenses to write Feminine Forever were paid for by Wyeth-Ayerst, the maker of the synthetic estrogen supplement Premarin. He also said that Wyeth-Ayerst financed his father’s organization, the Wilson Research Foundation, which had offices on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

Above all, political discussion is stunned by a delusion about science. This term has come to mean an institutional enterprise rather than a personal activity, the solving of puzzles rather than the unpredictably creative activity of individual people. Science is now used to label a spectral production agency which turns out better knowledge just as medicine produces better health. The damage done by this misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge is even more fundamental than the damage done to the conceptions of health, education, or mobility by their identification with institutional outputs. False expectations of better health corrupt society, but they do so in only one particular sense. They foster a declining concern with healthful environments, healthy life styles, and competence in the personal care of one's neighbor. Deceptions about health are circumstantial. The institutionalization of knowledge leads to a more general and degrading delusion. It makes people dependent on having their knowledge produced for them. It leads to a paralysis of the moral and political imagination.

too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full. On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.” Hyper-urbanization has separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent.

Not long ago, Malthusian thinking was revived with a vengeance. In 1967 William and Paul Paddock wrote Famine 1975!, and in 1968 the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, in which he proclaimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and predicted that by the 1980s sixty-five million Americans and four billion other people would starve to death. New York Times Magazine readers were introduced to the battlefield term triage (the emergency practice of separating wounded soldiers into the savable and the doomed) and to philosophy-seminar arguments about whether it is morally permissible to throw someone overboard from a crowded lifeboat to prevent it from capsizing and drowning everyone.10 Ehrlich and other environmentalists argued for cutting off food aid to countries they deemed basket cases.11 Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981, discouraged financing of health care “unless it was very strictly related to population control, because usually health facilities contributed to the decline of the death rate, and thereby to the population explosion.” Population-control programs in India and China (especially under China’s one-child policy) coerced women into sterilizations, abortions, and being implanted with painful and septic IUDs.12

There is far more to the Islamic way of life than fasting and segregating women, of course. Praying five times a day, avoiding alcohol, the custom of eating with the right hand, leaving the left for ablutions and many health measures associated with Islam, such as ritual washing. Then there is the Qur’an itself and the sonorous power of the Arabic language, with an attractive system of ethics including a focus on alms-giving and the equality of believers. Putting all this together created a powerful religious technology which made its followers more aggressive, confident, united and with a higher birth rate than any competing civilization. [...] People in the West see the traditional culture of the Muslim Middle East as primitive and “backward,” and there are constant calls for modernization. In fact, as had been seen, Islamic culture is anything but backward. Civilization first arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. It is no coincidence that these lands, with the longest experience of civilization, are now strongly and fervently Muslim. Long experience of civilization has bred a high-S genotype and culture which perfectly adapt people to survive and expand their numbers in dense agricultural and urban populations. Such countries tend to be poor (if we leave out the anomalous effects of oil wealth), since their peoples lack the temperament for industrialization. But wealth at that level is of no benefit in the long-term struggle for survival and success. To paraphrase Christian scripture, what does it benefit a civilization if it gains wealth but loses its strength and vigor? The advantages of Islam can be clearly seen in countries with mixed populations. Lebanon once had a Christian majority but is now 54% Muslim. In Communist Yugoslavia the provinces with Muslim populations grew much faster and received tax revenue from the wealthier Christian states. The population of Kosovo, the spiritual homeland of Christian Serbia, grew from 733,000 in 1948 to over two million in 1994, with the Muslim component surging from 68% to 90%, and lately going even higher. Meanwhile, Muslims are migrating into Europe where Christianity is in decline, the birth rate is far below replacement level, and people no longer have much faith in their own culture. Over the next few decades, as the next chapter will indicate, the native peoples of the West will become feebler and fewer. This means that on current trends Europe will become an Islamic continent in a century or so. The 1,400-year struggle between Islam and the West is coming to end. pp. 227 & 229-230

When I look at this age with the eye of a distant future, I find nothing so remarkable in the man of the present day as his peculiar virtue and sickness called "the historical sense." It is a tendency to something quite new and foreign in history: if this embryo were given several centuries and more, there might finally evolve out of it a marvellous plant, with a smell equally marvellous, on account of which our old earth might be more pleasant to live in than it has been hitherto. We moderns are just beginning to form the chain of a very powerful, future sentiment, link by link, we hardly know what we are doing. It almost seems to us as if it were not the question of a new sentiment, but of the decline of all old sentiments: the historical sense is still something so poor and cold, and many are attacked by it as by a frost, and are made poorer and colder by it. To others it appears as the indication of stealthily approaching age, and our planet is regarded by them as a melancholy invalid, who, in order to forget his present condition, writes the history of his youth. In fact, this is one aspect of the new sentiment He who knows how to regard the history of man in its entirety as his own history, feels in the immense generalisation all the grief of the invalid who thinks of health, of the old man who thinks of the dream of his youth, of the lover who is robbed of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is destroyed, of the hero on the evening of the indecisive battle which has brought him wounds and the loss of a friend. But to bear this immense sum of grief of all kinds, to be able to bear it, and yet still be the hero who at the commencement of a second day of battle greets the dawn and his happiness, as one who has an horizon of centuries before and behind him, as the heir of all nobility, of all past intellect, and the obligatory heir (as the noblest) of all the old nobles; while at the same time the first of a new nobility, the equal of which has never been seen nor even dreamt of: to take all this upon his soul, the oldest, the newest, the losses, hopes, conquests, and victories of mankind: to have all this at last in one soul, and to comprise it in one feeling: this would necessarily furnish a happiness which man has not hitherto known, a God's happiness, full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness which, like the sun in the evening, continually gives of its inexhaustible riches and empties into the sea, and like the sun, too, feels itself richest when even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars! This divine feeling might then be called humanity!

In short, the combined effects of lower infant mortality, higher longevity, and increased fertility have fueled an explosion in the world’s population, as figure 18 graphs. Since population growth is intrinsically exponential, even small increases in fertility or decreases in mortality spark rapid population growth. If an initial population of 1 million people grows at 3.5 percent per year, then it will roughly double every generation, growing to 2 million in twenty years, 4 million in forty years, and so on, reaching 32 million in a hundred years. In actual fact, the global growth rate peaked in 1963 at 2.2 percent per year and has since declined to about 1.1 percent per year,60 which translates into a doubling rate of every sixty-four years. In the fifty years between 1960 and 2010, the world’s population more than doubled, from 3 to 6.9 billion people. At current rates of growth, we can expect 14 billion people at the end of this century. FIGURE 21. The demographic transition model. Following economic development, death rates tend to fall before birth rates decrease, resulting in an initial population boom that eventually levels off. This controversial model, however, only applies to some countries. One major by-product of population growth plus the concentration of wealth in cities has been a shift to more urbanization. In 1800, only 25 million people lived in cities, about 3 percent of the world’s population. In 2010, about 3.3 billion people, half the world’s population, are city dwellers.

Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally. We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair. We cannot dismiss the accusations that his lockdowns proved more deadly than the contagion. A June 24, 2021 BMJ study22 showed that US life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during the quarantine. Since COVID mortalities were mainly among the elderly, and the average age of death from COVID in the UK was 82.4, which was above the average lifespan,23 the virus could not by itself cause the astonishing decline. As we shall see, Hispanic and Black Americans often shoulder the heaviest burden of Dr. Fauci’s public health adventures. In this respect, his COVID-19 countermeasures proved no exception. Between 2018 and 2020, the average Hispanic American lost around 3.9 years in longevity, while the average lifespan of a Black American dropped by 3.25 years.24 This dramatic culling was unique to America. Between 2018 and 2020, the 1.9 year decrease in average life expectancy at birth in the US was roughly 8.5 times the average decrease in 16 comparable countries, all of which were measured in months, not years.25

Critics of the U.S. Constitution say it is an instrument of class oppression – made by the rich to the disadvantage of the poor. They deny the reality of separate powers under the Constitution. For them, the inequalities of the market economy must be corrected by government intervention. A century ago Le Bon wrote of the difficulties involved in “reconciling Democratic equalization with natural inequalities.” As Le Bon pointed out, “Nature does not know such a thing as equality. She distributes unevenly genius, beauty, health, vigor, intelligence, and all the qualities which confer on their possessors a superiority over their fellows.” When a politician pretends to oppose the inequalities of nature, he proves to be a special kind of usurper – personifying arrogance in search of boundless power. Logically, the establishment of universal equality would first require the establishment of a universal tyranny (a.k.a., the dictatorship of the proletariat). A formula for doing all this was worked out in the nineteenth century, and was the program of Karl Marx. Le Bon warned that socialism might indeed “establish equality for a time by rigorously eliminating all superior individuals.” He also foresaw the decline of any nation that followed this path (i.e., see the Soviet Union). Such a society would aim at eliminating all risk, speculation and initiative. These stimulants of human activity being suppressed, no progress would be possible. According to Le Bon, “Men would merely have established that equality in poverty desired by the jealousy and envy of a host of mediocre minds.

among the young, a portent of the world’s future. Hate crimes, violence against women, and the victimization of children are all in long-term decline, as is the exploitation of children for their labor. As people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter. Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can. Literacy and the education it enables will soon be universal, for girls as well as boys. The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors. People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. They are using their leisure and disposable income to travel, spend time with their children, connect with loved ones, and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge, and culture. As a result of these gifts, people worldwide have become happier. Even Americans, who take their good fortune for granted, are “pretty happy” or happier, and the younger generations are becoming less unhappy, lonely, depressed, drug-addicted, and suicidal. As societies have become healthier, wealthier, freer, happier, and better educated, they have set their sights on the most pressing global challenges. They have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil,

As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice. One morning two weeks before the election, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general for the Trump administration, convened a press conference in which he announced a “global resolution” of the federal investigations into Purdue and the Sacklers. The company was pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as to two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-kickback Statute, Rosen announced. No executives would face individual charges. In fact, no individual executives were mentioned at all: it was as if the corporation had acted autonomously, like a driverless car. (In depositions related to Purdue’s bankruptcy which were held after the DOJ settlement, two former CEOs, John Stewart and Mark Timney, both declined to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.) Rosen touted the total value of the federal penalties against Purdue as “more than $8 billion.” And, in keeping with what had by now become a standard pattern, the press obligingly repeated that number in the headlines. Of course, anyone who was paying attention knew that the total value of Purdue’s cash and assets was only around $1 billion, and nobody was suggesting that the Sacklers would be on the hook to pay Purdue’s fines. So the $8 billion figure was misleading, much as the $10–$12 billion estimate of the value of the Sacklers’ settlement proposal had been misleading—an artificial number without any real practical meaning, designed chiefly to be reproduced in headlines. As for the Sacklers, Rosen announced that they had agreed to pay $225 million to resolve a separate civil charge that they had violated the False Claims Act. According to the investigation, Richard, David, Jonathan, Kathe, and Mortimer had “knowingly caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to federal health care benefit programs” for opioids that “were prescribed for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.” But there would be no criminal charges. In fact, according to a deposition of David Sackler, the Department of Justice concluded its investigation without so much as interviewing any member of the family. The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them.

Sensitivity to dopamine also declines because dopamine receptors, anticipating high levels, have down-regulated. This may explain Goethe’s famous remark, ‘Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days.

Organizations naturally decline, so for optimum results, actively experiment and continuously tweak.

During World Wars I and II, wartime food restrictions that virtually eliminated meat consumption in Scandinavian countries were followed by a decline in the mortality rate (by ≈2 deaths/1000) that returned to prewar levels after the restriction was lifted (7–12).

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars, and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940. Researchers documented a similar phenomenon during civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. An Irish psychologist named H. A. Lyons found that suicide rates in Belfast dropped 50 percent during the riots of 1969 and 1970, and homicide and other violent crimes also went down. Depression rates for both men and women declined abruptly during that period, with men experiencing the most extreme drop in the most violent districts. County Derry, on the other hand—which suffered almost no violence at all—saw male depression rates rise rather than fall. Lyons hypothesized that men in the peaceful areas were depressed because they couldn’t help their society by participating in the struggle. “When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health,” Lyons wrote in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979. “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.

You just can’t expect business to start immediately, not until you’d drunk at least three cups of coffee. If you declined sooner, you risked insulting your host. All the while the coffee- and tea-drinking was going on, Hassan and I asked after the health of the other’s family and friends, and called on Allah to bless this one and that one and protect all of us and the whole Muslim world from the depredations of the infidel.

Populations are already declining in about two dozen states around the world; by 2050 the number will have climbed to three dozen. Some of the richest places on earth are shedding people every year: Japan, Korea, Spain, Italy, much of Eastern Europe. “We are a dying country,” Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, lamented in 2015.4

God compared the church to a marriage. Until the church realizes the covenant of spouses is vital for the health of the church, the community, it will continue to decline in relevance.

Sadly, though, millions of people watched. And in my view, the “Commander in Chief Forum” was representative of how many in the press covered the campaign as a whole. According again to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, discussion of public policy accounted for just 10 percent of all campaign news coverage in the general election. Nearly all the rest was taken up by obsessive coverage of controversies such as email. Health care, taxes, trade, immigration, national security—all of it crammed into just 10 percent of the press coverage. The Shorenstein Center found that not a single one of my many detailed policy plans received more than a blip of press coverage. “If she had a policy agenda, it was not apparent in the news,” it concluded. “Her lengthy record of public service also received scant attention.” None of Trump’s scandals, from scamming students at Trump University, to stiffing small businesses in Atlantic City, to exploiting his foundation, to refusing to release his taxes as every presidential candidate since 1976 has done—and on and on—generated the kind of sustained, campaign-defining coverage that my emails did. The decline of serious reporting on policy has been going on for a while, but it got much worse in 2016. In 2008, the major networks’ nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes. In 2016, it was just 32 minutes. (That stat is from two weeks before the election, but it didn’t change much in the final stretch.) By contrast, 100 minutes were spent covering my emails. In other words, the political press was telling voters that my emails were three times more important than all the other issues combined.

There is now good dietary information for the two chief conditions referring to mental decline. On the modest side, there is a condition called "cognitive impairment" or "cognitive dysfunction." This condition describes the declining ability to remember and think as well as one once did. It represents a continuum of disease ranging from cases that only hint at declining abilities to those that are much more obvious and easily diagnosed. Then there are mental dysfunctions that become serious, even life threatening. These are called dementia, of which there are two main types: vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Vascular dementia is primarily caused by multiple little strokes resulting from broken blood vessels in the brain. It is common for elderly people to have "silent" strokes in their later years. A stroke is considered silent if it goes undetected and undiagnosed. Each little stroke incapacitates part of the brain. The other type of dementia, Alzheimer's, occurs when a protein substance called beta-amyloid accumulates in critical areas of the brain as a plaque, rather like the cholesterol-laden plaque that builds up in cardiovascular diseases.

physical activity level (PAL), the ratio of the energy you spend per day relative to the energy you would spend by resting in bed and doing absolutely nothing. PALs for male adults with clerical or administrative jobs that involve sitting all day long average 1.56 in developed countries and 1.61 in less developed countries; in contrast, PALs for workers involved in manufacturing or farming average 1.78 in developed countries and 1.86 in less developed countries.17 Hunter-gatherer PALs average 1.85, about the same as those of farmers or other people whose job requires them to be active.18 Therefore, the amount of energy a typical office worker spends being active on an average day has decreased by roughly 15 percent for many people in the last generation or two. Such a reduction is not trivial. If an average-sized male farmer or carpenter who spends approximately 3,000 calories per day suddenly switches to a sedentary lifestyle by retiring, his energy expenditure will decline by about 450 calories a day. Unless he compensates by eating a lot less or exercising more intensively, he’ll grow obese.

This rip-off relied on a series of blatant lies. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your plan.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” “The average family will save more than $2,400 per year.” “Health care costs will decline.” “Health care premiums will go down.” “Everyone in this country will now have health insurance.” Even though Obama kept saying these things, none of them was true. These statements were simply part of the con man’s “pitch.

Procurement sets fees based on a negotiated agreement about agency headcounts and costs, and (separately) marketing generates workloads for the agencies. Agencies, who measure client health through profitability measures alone, have no rigorous way to factor in client workloads. TABLE

The rationing system that was set up in Britain at the outbreak of the hostilities was as revolutionary as anything the Communists could have dreamed up. Almost every basic item of food was rationed , as were other essentials such as clothing and household goods. Nobody was entitled to more food if they were richer, or of a higher social standing than their neighbors -the only people entitled to better rations were those in the armed forces, or those in occupations that required heavy physical labour. As a consequence, the general health of the population actually improved (italics) during the war: by the late 1940's infant mortality rates in England were in steady decline, and deaths from a variety of disease had also dropped substantially since the prewar years. From the standpoint of public health, the war made Britain a much fairer society. There were other changes in Britain during the war that had a similar effect, such as the introduction of conscription to people of all classes, and both sexes. "Social and sexual distinctions were swept away.' wrote Theodora FitzGibbon. 'and when a dramatic change such as that takes place, it never goes back quite in the same way.

Environmentalists probably know already about “the Great Pacific garbage patch”—that mass of plastic, twice the size of Texas, floating freely in the Pacific Ocean. It is not actually an island—in fact, it is not actually a stable mass, only rhetorically convenient for us to think of it that way. And it is mostly composed of larger-scale plastics, of the kind visible to the human eye. The microscopic bits—700,000 of them can be released into the surrounding environment by a single washing-machine cycle—are more insidious. And, believe it or not, more pervasive: a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and California contain plastics, according to one recent study. European eaters of shellfish, one estimate has suggested, consume at least 11,000 bits each year. The direct effect on ocean life is even more striking. The total number of marine species said to be adversely affected by plastic pollution has risen from 260 in 1995, when the first assessment was carried out, to 690 in 2015 and 1,450 in 2018. A majority of fish tested in the Great Lakes contained microplastics, as did the guts of 73 percent of fish surveyed in the northwest Atlantic. One U.K. supermarket study found that every 100 grams of mussels were infested with 70 particles of plastic. Some fish have learned to eat plastic, and certain species of krill are now functioning as plastic processing plants, churning microplastics into smaller bits that scientists are now calling “nanoplastics.” But krill can’t grind it all down; in one square mile of water near Toronto, 3.4 million microplastic particles were recently trawled. Of course, seabirds are not immune: one researcher found 225 pieces of plastic in the stomach of a single three-month-old chick, weighing 10 percent of its body mass—the equivalent of an average human carrying about ten to twenty pounds of plastic in a distended belly. (“Imagine having to take your first flight out to sea with all that in your stomach,” the researcher told the Financial Times, adding: “Around the world, seabirds are declining faster than any other bird group.”) Microplastics have been found in beer, honey, and sixteen of seventeen tested brands of commercial sea salt, across eight different countries. The more we test, the more we find; and while nobody yet knows the health impact on humans, in the oceans a plastic microbead is said to be one million times more toxic than the water around it. Chances are, if we started slicing open human cadavers to look for microplastics—as we are beginning to do with tau proteins, the supposed markers of CTE and Alzheimer’s—we’d be finding plastic in our own flesh, too. We can breathe in microplastics, even when indoors, where they’ve been detected suspended in the air, and do already drink them: they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested American cities. And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

In the fall of 2020, as we got closer to flu season, I started to worry. Every year, influenza kills tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of people around the world, nearly all of them elderly. Even more are hospitalized. At a time when COVID was overwhelming or at least sorely testing virtually every health system on the planet, a bad flu season could have been disastrous. But there was not a bad flu season that year. In fact, there was hardly any flu season at all. Between the flu seasons of 2019–20 and 2020–21, cases dropped 99 percent. As of late 2021, one particular type of flu known as B/Yamagata had not been detected anywhere in the world since April 2020. Other respiratory viruses also dropped dramatically. By the time you read this book, of course, things may have changed. Flu strains have a way of disappearing for long periods and then suddenly recurring without explanation. But the huge decline in cases across the board is unmistakable, however long it lasts, and we know why: Nonpharmaceutical interventions made a dramatic difference in reducing flu transmission when combined with the prior immunity and vaccinations that people had.

When our preoccupation with others distracts us from our responsibilities to attend to our own physical, emotional, and spiritual health, we suffer. Our health and self-esteem decline. We become incapable of accepting reality, coping with change, or finding happiness. Our lives fly out of control.

Privatization was sold as the means of injecting greater efficiency into the health care system as it contended with declining levels of financial support.