Reverse 1999 Quotes

Are vegetarian diets an effective alternative, or complement, to drugs and surgery? Although studies designed to answer this question are limited in number and small in size, their results are encouraging. In 1990, Dr. Dean Ornish demonstrated that a very low-fat vegetarian diet (less than 10 per cent calories from fat) and lifestyle changes (stress management, aerobic exercise, and group therapy) could not only slow the progression of atherosclerosis, but significantly reverse it. After one year, 82 per cent of the experimental group participants experienced regression of their disease, while in the control group the disease continued to progress. The control group followed a “heart healthy” diet commonly prescribed by physicians that provided less than 30 per cent calories from fat and less than 200 milligrams of cholesterol a day. Over the next four years, people in the experimental group continued to reverse their arterial damage, while those in the control group became steadily worse and had twice as many cardiac events. In 1999, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn reported on a twelve-year study of eleven patients following a very low-fat vegan diet, coupled with cholesterol-lowering medication. Approximately 70 per cent experienced reversal of their disease. In the eight years prior to the study, these patients experienced a total of forty-eight cardiac events, while in over a decade of the trial, only one non-compliant patient experienced an event.

A perhaps more relevant example is taken from a 1999 Gallup experiment (see Newport 2004), which asked respondents what the federal government should do with the budget surplus. When respondents were given a choice between “tax cuts” or “increased spending on government programs,” nearly three-quarters of respondents chose the tax cut option. But when the question was reframed as a choice between tax cuts and spending on specific government programs such as Medicare and public education, the percentages were very nearly reversed. While citizens often express considerable enthusiasm for “cutting government,” that enthusiasm very nearly vanishes when they are asked to consider “government” at the operational level – that is, at the level of specific programs that the government undertakes.

And that’s true even if everything’s gone crazy—even if it seems like anyone with half a pitch deck is getting funded. Like how it was in 1999. Or how it is right now in 2022. The world of investment is cyclical. The funding environment is always shifting back and forth from a founder-friendly environment to an investor-friendly environment. It’s like the housing market—sometimes it’s good for sellers, sometimes for buyers. In a founder-friendly environment, there’s so much money flowing into the marketplace that investors will fund just about anything because they don’t want to miss out on any deals. In an investor-friendly market, there’s a lot less capital to go around, investors are pickier, and founders get worse terms. And then sometimes there’s a crazy market when it feels like cash is raining from the sky, all the rules have been thrown out, and it’s never going to end. But it will end. Just like it ended in 2000. There’s always a reversion to the mean.

Visual agnosia is the inability of the brain to make sense of or make use of some part of an otherwise normal visual stimulus and is typified by the inability to recognize familiar objects or faces. This is distinct from blindness, which is a lack of sensory input to the brain due to damage to the eye, optic nerve, or the primary visual cortex. Visual agnosia is often due to stroke affecting the posterior occipital and/or temporal lobe(s) in the brain. The specific dysfunctions vary depending on the type of agnosia. Some sufferers are unable to copy drawings but are able to manipulate objects with good dexterity. Commonly, patients can name the object, here a tea cup, categorize it, but cannot describe its function; or the reverse, be able to drink from it appropriately but not know its name or describe its uses. Lesion studies clearly demonstrate that even crystallized objects, your left foot, or here a tea cup, are not “things” in long-term memory but are concepts constructed from multiple brain modules at the moment of perception (Farah, 1999).