Statistic Death Quotes

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

Miracles are statistical improbabilities. And fate is an illusion humanity uses to comfort itself in the dark. There are no absolutes in life, save death.

The death of one is a tragedy, but death of a million is just a statistic.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.

The truth is that the 143 million orphaned children and the 11 million who starve to death or die from preventable diseases and the 8.5 million who work as child slaves, prostitutes, or under other horrific conditions and the 2.3 million who live with HIV add up to 164.8 million needy children. And though at first glance that looks like a big number, 2.1 billion people on this earth proclaim to be Christians. The truth is that if only 8 percent of the Christians would care for one more child, there would not be any statistics left.

A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics.

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

If you enjoyed laughing in the face of death, you might like to have a crack at High Saffron. One hundred merits, and all you have to do is take a look.' 'I understand there's a one hundred percent fatality rate?' 'True. But up until the moment of death there was a one hundred percent survival rate. Really, I shouldn't let anything as meaningless as statistics put you off.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Statistics stay silent in us.

You know that old cliché about millions of deaths being a statistic while the loss of just one life is a tragedy? If that's true, what is it when you lose something that never even had the chance to be born? I've had lots of relationships in my time, platonic and otherwise, but the ones I think about most are those that never quite made it to term. The dashing first date who didn't call you back. The lady on the train you had that amazing conversation but never saw again. The cool neighbor kid you met the first time a week before he moved away. I guess I'm just haunted by all that potential energy. One moment, the universe presents you with this amazing opportunity for new possibilities...and then...

The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?” No. Medical statistics not only describe numbers such as mean survival, they measure our confidence in our numbers, with tools like confidence levels, confidence intervals, and confidence bounds. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbable but still plausible outcome—a survival just above the measured 95 percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional”? Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

At school you were taught about chemicals in test tubes, equations to describe motion, and maybe something on photosynthesis—about which more later—but in all likelihood you were taught nothing about death, risk, statistics, and the science of what will kill or cure you.

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. Quoted by someone with a very sick imagination but misattributed to Stalin

…he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern.

There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ Can you imagine seven billion of anything? I have trouble doing it. It pushes the limits of our ability to comprehend. And that’s exactly why they did it. Like running up the score in football. You played football, right? It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.

He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by the calculated chance of searching fire, even as he himself might be at any moment. Mathematics! Mathematics! Algebra! Geometry! When 1st and 3d Squads came diving and tumbling back over the tiny crest, Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am I here? Why am I here? After a moment's thought, he decided he better change it to: why are we here. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish.

From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished. What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?

In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white.

Poison’s generally a woman’s weapon.” “Sexist.” “Statistics,” she countered.

In time, the Navy would compile statistics showing that for a career Navy pilot, i.e., one who intended to keep flying for twenty years... there was a 23 percent probability that he would die in an aircraft accident. This did not even include combat deaths, since the military did not classify death in combat as accidental.

Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patient or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but of being defective, either morally or psychologically.

Coping with any death is traumatic; suicide compounds the anguish because we are forced to deal with two traumatic events at the same time. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the level of stress resulting from the suicide of a loved one is ranked as catastrophic–equivalent to that of a concentration camp experience.

Up until the moment of death, there was a 100% survival rate. Really. I wouldn't let anything as meaningless as statistics put you off.

I would ask the reader to pause for a moment and ponder the statistics. Statistics are mere numbers; they need to be translated into human experience. What would a 90 percent mortality rate mean to the survivors and their society? The Black Death in Europe at its worst carried off 30 to 60 percent of the population. That was devastating enough. But the mortality rate wasn’t high enough to destroy European civilization. A 90 percent mortality rate is high enough: It does not just kill people; it annihilates societies; it destroys languages, religions, histories, and cultures. It chokes off the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The survivors are deprived of that vital human connection to their past; they are robbed of their stories, their music and dance, their spiritual practices and beliefs—they are stripped of their very identity.

based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban,

When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, "This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him--ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don't think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of 'Our Brave Boys' from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that 'unsightly stone' isn't removed.

When I speak at universities, in colleges, I share these statistics. I tell them that even as we are labeled criminal, we are actually the victims of crime. And I tell them there are no stats to track collateral deaths, the ones that unfold over months and years spent in mourning and grief: the depression that becomes addiction to alcohol that becomes cirrhosis; or else addiction to food that becomes diabetes that becomes a stroke . Slow deaths . Undocumented deaths. Deaths with a common root: the hatred that tells a person daily that their life and the life of those they love ain't worth shit, a truth made ever more real when the people who harm you are never held accountable.

We have presumed based not on our own but on others’ deaths that we are mortal.

The non-scientist in the street probably has a clearer notion of physics, chemistry and biology than of statistics, regarding statisticians as numerical philatelists, mere collector of numbers.

Someone A man worn down by time, a man who does not even expect death (the proofs of death are statistics and everyone runs the risk of being the first immortal), a man who has learned to express thanks for the days' modest alms: sleep, routine, the taste of water, an unsuspected etymology, a Latin or Saxon verse, the memory of a woman who left him thirty years ago now whom he can call to mind without bitterness, a man who is aware that the present is both future and oblivion, a man who has betrayed and has been betrayed, may feel suddenly, when crossing the street, a mysterious happiness not coming from the side of hope but from an ancient innocence, from his own root or from some diffuse god. He knows better than to look at it closely, for there are reasons more terrible than tigers which will prove to him that wretchedness is his duty, but he accepts humbly this felicity, this glimmer. Perhaps in death when the dust is dust, we will be forever this undecipherable root, from which will grow forever, serene or horrible, or solitary heaven or hell.

what is the expression which the age demands? the age demands no expression whatever. we have seen photographs of bereaved asian mothers. we are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. there is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. do not even try. you will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. we have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. you are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. this should make you very quiet. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. everyone knows you are in pain. you cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. you have nothing to teach them. you are not more beautiful than they are. you are not wiser. do not shout at them. do not force a dry entry. that is bad sex. if you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. and remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. what is our need? to be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. the bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. they have also destroyed the stage. did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? there is no more stage. there are no more footlights. you are among the people. then be modest. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. be by yourself. be in your own room. do not put yourself on. do not act out words. never act out words. never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. if you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. if ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material. this is an interior landscape. it is inside. it is private. respect the privacy of the material. these pieces were written in silence. the courage of the play is to speak them. the discipline of the play is not to violate them. let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. be good whores. the poem is not a slogan. it cannot advertise you. it cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. you are students of discipline. do not act out the words. the words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. the poem is nothing but information. it is the constitution of the inner country. if you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. you are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. think of the words as science, not as art. they are a report. you are speaking before a meeting of the explorers' club of the national geographic society. these people know all the risks of mountain climbing. they honour you by taking this for granted. if you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. do not work the audience for gasps ans sighs. if you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. it will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence. avoid the flourish. do not be afraid to be weak. do not be ashamed to be tired. you look good when you're tired. you look like you could go on forever. now come into my arms. you are the image of my beauty.

The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new "liberating" culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a "culture of death," as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin's empire to the same inglorious end?

At school you were taught about chemicals in test tubes, equations to describe motion, and maybe something on photosynthesis – about which more later – but in all likelihood you were taught nothing about death, risk, statistics, and the science of what will kill or cure you. The hole in our culture is gaping: evidence-based medicine, the ultimate applied science, contains some of the cleverest ideas from the past two centuries, it has saved millions of lives, but there has never once been a single exhibit on the subject in London’s Science Museum.

Leftists bruit about statistics on accidents where children are killed with revolvers. But these data are wildly exaggerated by including the shooting deaths of young, teenaged gang-bangers, whose deaths are certainly purposeful.

Parents die, and children go on living. It is statistically sound to say that this is the case for the majority of the population. But sometimes children die before their parents. Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because they do not have many options they either live or follow their children down to Hades. Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest:to live after their deaths.

When we choose a generality, an idea, a cause, instead of a person, when this becomes the accepted, the required thing to do, then it doesn’t matter if villages are destroyed by bombs; traffic deaths become statistics; starving babies can be forgotten when the television is turned off; and there will no longer be anybody who will read or write a poem or a story, who will look at or paint a picture, who will listen to or compose a symphony. No young man will walk whistling up the street. No young girl will sing about the love in her heart. 2

It would be hard to get statistics on violent death -- what do you count as murder? When people starve to death because of policies of governments and corporations, is that murder? Nature does a fair amount of murdering itself, which is why this whole notion of dominating nature arose: it was one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time. No one ever believes a cure will prove worse than the disease. And maybe it isn't. An invasion of microbes that destroys a body could also be called murder. All deaths are violent deaths, I suppose.

His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant's fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator's coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.

Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?

As she waited for the applause to subside, she thought of the statistic that said people feared public speaking more than they feared death. She loved it. She enjoyed all of the concatenated moments of presenting in front of a listening audience—teaching, performing, telling a story, teeing up a heated debate. She also loved the adrenaline rush. The bigger the stakes, the more sophisticated or hostile the audience, the more the whole experience thrilled her.

My flight was announced by Donald Duck noises from a loudspeaker; I arose and shuffled off towards the statistical improbability of dying in an airplane crash. Personally, the thought of such a death appalls me little – what civilized man would not rather die like Icarus than be mangled to death on a Motorway by a Ford Popular?

Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.*1 Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died.*2 By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate.

African Americans had been spared the full brunt of the opioid epidemic: doctors were less likely to prescribe opioid painkillers to Black patients, either because they did not trust them to take the drugs responsibly or because they were less likely to feel empathy for these patients and want to treat their pain aggressively. As a result, levels of addiction and death were statistically low among African Americans. It appeared to be a rare instance in which systemic racism could be said to have protected the community.

senators heaped doubt on her statistics about mothers dying and downplayed the significance of the mothers’ deaths, saying that more men die at work, so women shouldn’t complain.

There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ Can

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So

To justify murdering tens of millions, Stalin is reputed to have said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

The death of European Christianity means the disappearance of the European tribe, a prospect visible in the demographic statistics of every Western nation.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. “The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.

Corbin wanted, quite simply, to die. He had wished for death many times over his long lifespan, but never as fervently as he did while Beth Adams rattled off breastfeeding statistics, her baby sucking industriously, mouth fully around the entire areola, as Sam was quick to point out, finger outlining the area in question. Corbin was speechless. -Corbin at Baby Boot Camp

Quantitative historians who use statistical tools to study big-picture historical trends, created a vast database of research on more than 36,000 slave ship voyages that took place over four hundred years. They found that there was a revolt on at least one in ten of these voyages. That was a much higher number than anyone expected. Revolts were never easy, but revolts on slave ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean were basically suicide missions. Nonetheless, many captives chose death over this exceptionally horrid new kind of slavery. This type of resistance was so expensive and time-consuming for the slavers, these historians estimate that it prevented at least a million more people from being captured and entering the slave trade. So why would a revolt happen on one ship and not another? The quantitative historians couldn't find a clear pattern, other than that captives tried to revolt whenever they would. But one thing did stand out: The more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt. Let me emphasize this point: the more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt would occur.

We know that media vita in morte sumus or, “in the midst of life we are in death.” We begin dying the day we are born, after all. But because of advances in medical science, the majority of Americans will spend the later years of their life actively dying. The fastest-growing segment of the US population is over eighty-five, what I would call the aggressively elderly. If you reach eighty-five, not only is there a strong chance you are living with some form of dementia or terminal disease, but statistics show that you have a 50-50 chance of ending up in a nursing home, raising the question of whether a good life is measured in quality or quantity. This slow decline differs sharply from times past, when people tended to die quickly, often in a single day. Postmortem daguerreotypes from the 1800s picture fresh, young, almost lifelike corpses, many of them victims of scarlet fever or diphtheria. In 1899, a mere 4 percent of the US population was over sixty-five—forget making it to eighty-five. Now, many will know that death is coming during months or years of deterioration. Medicine has given us the “opportunity”—loosely defined—to sit at our own wakes.

When is posttraumatic stress pathological? The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV23 or DSM-IV-TR24)b lays out specific criteria. Criterion A: Trauma. Yes, the event that created Batman (1) involved death or physical danger and (2) horrified the survivor. Criterion B: Persistent re-experiencing. Yes, Bruce re-experiences his parents’ murders through recurrent, vivid recollections and

Just then, Larry recalled a conversation he had with a friend in Ireland, about the situation in Nepal between the King and the Maoists. The friend was sided with the Maoists, which was more or less his political leanings in any case, and stated that at least they were trying to help the people. So Larry had remarked upon the rising death rate, and how the Maoists are just as brutal as the security forces, yet the friend simply shrugged and said you have to expect some collateral damage in a revolution. Oh how he hates that phrase, as that makes it sound like the people’s lives are meant to be expendable, something that a person’s life should never be. Of course, it is very easy to disregard people you have never met, and who are certainly not your friends or family members. After all, in the eyes of an outsider, who is in no danger whatsoever, the people caught up in the situation are nothing more than simply statistics.

But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.

An appropriately warm and affectionate relationship with the father is the greatest basis for future warm and lasting relationships with men emotionally and sexually. I say this not by virtue of any statistic but by virtue of the absence of such relationships is most of the sexually unhappy women I've treated. I can't think of one who had a wondrous relationship with her father- except for those who did have such a relationship but lost it because of the early death of the father.

Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women (you take a 7 percent pay cut, on average, just for getting hitched); married women do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women do; married women are significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to die a violent death than single women—usually at the hands of a husband, which raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person in the average woman’s life is her own man.

Girls mature faster than boys, cost more to raise, and statistics show that the old saw about girls not knowing about money and figures is a myth. Girls start to outspend boys before puberty—and they manage to maintain this lead until death or an ugly credit manager, whichever comes first. Males are born with a closed fist. Girls are born with the left hand cramped in a position the size of an American Express card. Whenever a girl sees a sign reading, “Sale, Going Out of Business, Liquidation,” saliva begins to form in her mouth, the palms of her hands perspire and the pituitary gland says, “Go, Mama.” In the male, it is quite a different story. He has a gland that follows a muscle from the right arm down to the base of his billfold pocket. It's called “cheap.” Girls can slam a door louder, beg longer, turn tears on and off like a faucet, and invented the term, “You don't trust me.” So much for “sugar and spice and everything nice” and “snips and snails and puppydog tails.

You can read the statistic that the human body holds twenty-five feet of intestines, but until you see it in all its red-white-and-blue glory, you can’t envision it. Twenty-five feet is a lot of intestines, and I was awash. The pulsating, ferocious smell of innards pressed and throbbed in my throat. I pushed snaking lines of slippery viscera to the side, winding some around the nearby jigsaw. The guts smelled like raw haggis—no, let me rephrase: the air smelled like atavistic lust and honor and jubilance and ecstasy.

Death to the attacker was a yardstick of success, to the media person and the government, was a mere statistic. But to her, and countless other people, death had a name, a face and a story, and a countless number of emotions. And to each, theirs was the most painful.

It shook me as nothing had shaken me before. I had heard about earthquakes that engulfed thousands, about streams of burning lava that buried villages, about oceans that swallowed up islands. I had read of one million people drowned by the Yellow River, of two million drowned by the Yangtse. I knew that a million soldiers died at Verdun. But these were mere abstractions — numbers, statistics, information. One couldn't suffer for a million. But these three children I knew, I had seen with my own eyes — this was altogether different.

White backlash politics gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals; yet the victories came at a steep cost. When white backlash policies became laws, as in cutting away health care programs and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of health care delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centers, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was—and I say this with the support of statistics detailed in the chapters that follow—increasing rates of death.

Campbell’s slideshow lists grim domestic violence statistic after statistic: second leading cause of death for African American women, third leading cause of death for native women, seventh leading cause of death for Caucasian women. Campbell says twelve hundred abused women are killed every year in the United States.1 That figure does not count children. And it does not count the abusers who kill themselves after killing their partners, murder-suicides we see daily in the newspaper. And it does not count same-sex relationships where one or the other partner might not be “out.” And it does not count other family members, like sisters, aunts, grandmothers, who are often killed alongside the primary victim. And it does not count innocent bystanders: the twenty-six churchgoers in Texas, say, after a son-in-law has gone to a service to target his mother-in-law, or the two spa employees in Wisconsin killed alongside their client by her ex. The list is endless. And it does not count the jurisdictions who do not report their homicides, since homicide reporting is voluntary through the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reporting Data. So how many people are killed as a result of domestic violence each year? The bystanders, the other family members, the perpetrators’ suicides? The victims who just can’t take it anymore and kill themselves? The accidents that turn out not to be accidents at all, victims pushed out of cars and from cliffs or driven into trees. Tragedies forever uncategorized.

Using more traditional methods of tallying assaults, the statistics showed that Border Patrol agents did not experience the highest assault rate among law enforcement officers. They experienced the lowest. The death rate among Border Patrol agents was about one-third that of the nation’s law enforcement officers who policed residents.

None of his colleagues or friends, or former colleagues or former friends, had died. Sometimes it amazed him that he’d managed to live forty-two years without proximity to mortality. And that amazement was always followed by the fear that the statistics would catch up with him and offer a lot of death at once. And he wouldn’t be ready.

From the point of view of genes in any male body, the body itself is a sinking prison ship. Death comes to all bodies sooner or later. Even if a male devoted all of his energy to surviving, by storing up huge fat reserves and hiding in an armored underground compound, statistics guarantee that an accident would sooner or later kill him. This paranoid survivalist strategy is no way to spread one's genes through a population. The only deliverance for a male's genes is through an escape tube into a female body carrying a fertile egg. Genes can survive in the long term only by jumping ship into offspring. In species that reproduce sexually, the only way to make offspring is to merge one's genes with another individual's. And the only way to do that, for males, is to attract a female of the species through courtship. This is why males of most species evolve to act as if copulation is the whole point of life. For male genes, copulation is the gateway to immortality. This is why males risk their lives for copulation opportunities.

But it’s more than the deaths I saw; it’s the destruction. The noise with which we go seems to make it count for more. I think of my buddies who checked out via hand grenade versus those who died from MRSA back in the VA. We barely notice the latter. They’re statistics. Go quietly, and you’re a number. Go in spectacular fashion, and you’re a name.

The ending of the existing social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can be accomplished only by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of our committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone. The committee, as soon as the present institutions have been overthrown, proclaims that everything is common property, orders the setting up of workers' societies (artels) and at the same time publishes statistical tables compiled by experts and pointing out what branches of labour are most needed in a certain locality and what branches may run into difficulties there. For a certain number of days assigned for the revolutionary upheaval and the disorders that are bound to follow, each person must join one or another of these artels according to his own choice... All those who remain isolated and unattached to workers' groups without sufficient reason will have no right of access either to the communal eating places or to the communal dormitories, or to any other buildings assigned to meet the various needs of the brother-workers or that contain the goods and materials, the victuals or tools reserved for all members of the established workers' society; in a word, he who without sufficient reason has not joined an artel, will be left without means of subsistence. All the roads, all the means of communication will be closed to him; he will have no other alternative but work or death.

A total of 105 patrol officers died on the job in 2012. Less half of those (51) died as the result of violence, and another 48 died in traffic accidents. Between 1961 and 2012, 3,847 cops were murdered and 2,946 died in accidents—averaging about 75 murders and 58 fatal accidents in a typical year. Naturally it is not to be lost sight of that these numbers represent human lives, not widgets or sacks of potatoes. But let’s also remember that there were 4,383 fatal work injuries in 2012. As dangerous professions go, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, policing is not even in the top ten. In terms of total fatalities, more truck drivers are killed than any other kind of worker (741 in 2012). A better measure of occupational risk, however, is the rate of work-related deaths per 100,000 workers. In 2012, for example, it was 17.4 for truck drivers. At 15.0 deaths per 100,000, policing is slightly less dangerous than being a maintenance worker (15.7) and slightly more dangerous than supervising the gardener (14.7). The highest rate of fatalities is among loggers at 127.8 per 100,000, just ahead of fishers at 117.0. The rate for all occupations, taken together, is 3.2 per 100,000 workers. Where are the headlines, the memorials, the honor guards, and the sorrowful renderings of Taps for these workers? Where are the mayoral speeches, the newspaper editorials, the sober reflections that these brave men and women died, and that others risk their lives daily, so that we might continue to enjoy the benefits of modern society?

Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact—that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history—because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure—combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).

Telling you all this, Camilo, the stab of pain that sliced through my chest that day comes back in full force; it’s a recurring pain that ambushes me out of nowhere. There can’t be a pain worse than that one, so great it has no name. I know, I know, who am I to complain? My daughter’s death wasn’t a punishment. I’m just a statistic, this is the oldest and most common suffering in human history. Before, no one even expected children to survive, so many died in childhood, and it’s still that way in a large part of the world, but that does nothing to lessen the horror when you’re the mother. I felt like I’d been emptied out from the inside, I was a bloody cavity, I couldn’t breathe, my bones were made of wax, my soul had taken flight. And the world still turned as if nothing had happened: I stand up, take one step then another, find my voice and respond, I haven’t lost my mind, I drink water, my mouth full of sand, my eyes burning, and my little girl stiff, frozen, sculpted in alabaster—my daughter who will never again call me Mom, who left a tremendous imprint in her passage through my life, the memory of her laughter, her grace, her rebelliousness, her suffering.

Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and Plumpy’nut, can decrease them.

And never fall into that statistical macho trap that’s so prevalent in fly-fishing these days. If you keep score, you can be beaten, but if you refuse to compete you can leave the impression that you have long since risen above that kind of crap. When someone says to you, “I caught forty-eight trout and ten of them were twenty inches or better. How’d you do?” say, “Yeah, we got some. Couple nice ones, too.

In other words, the important statistic is the risk of violent death for each person. To illustrate this point, there were 49 homicides in Denmark in 2012 (population: 5.6 million), so the chance of any particular Dane being murdered that year was less than one in 100,000. But in a typical small-scale society, with a population of, say, 1,000, 49 homicides would translate into one chance in 20 of being murdered. As

How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: ‘It feeds upon negative entropy’, attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level.

Until such time as duplications of individual nervous systems can be grown in tissue cultures (at this point no one knows "whose" consciousness they would have), our special identities will always be subject to being hit by a truck or dying in a plane crash. A sudden virus or heart seizure, even in the body's youth, may carry us off. Statistically, looking ahead thousands of years, the chances are that every human and even inanimate form will be broken sooner or later. But the distress felt by men and women today does not arise from the fear of such hazards. Rather, it comes from the certainty of aging and physical degeneration leading to death. It is the fear of losing our powers and being left alone, or in the hands of indifferent nurses, and knowing that the moment must come when we will not see the people we love any more, and everything will go black.

Mine is not the first voice to suggest that as patients, as families, and even as doctors, we need to find hope in other ways, more realistic ways, than in the pursuit of elusive and danger-filled cures. In the care of advanced disease, whether cancer or some other determined killer, hope should be redefined. Some of my sickest patients have taught me of the varieties of hope that can come when death is certain. I wish I could report that there were many such people, but there have, in fact, been few. Almost everyone seems to want to take a chance with the slim statistics that oncologists give to patients with advanced disease. Usually they suffer for it, and they die anyway, having magnified the burdens they and those who love them must carry to the final moments. Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force.

Perhaps the most telling report on the low-carb diet and health is the recent summary of 17 studies published in January 2013 involving 272,216 subjects,59 in which a low-carb diet showed a statistically significant 31 percent increase in total deaths. This finding is even more telling than the statistics suggest because this 31 percent increase is in comparison to the already high mortality typically observed for the SAD, when compared to a whole food, plant-based diet.

Here are a few statistics: Someone in the world dies by suicide every forty seconds. For every death by suicide there are more than twenty others attempting it. It’s the tenth-ranking cause of death in the United States. One of every sixty-two Americans is a suicide loss survivor. Those were taken from the World Health Organization and the American Association of Suicidology’s official data—the most recent available at the end of 2018 (the time of my writing this updated note).

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

As an adult, I love the forest. To be deeply enveloped in the woods, everything around you living, breathing, moving - is pure magic. On any given street, in any town, on any day, you could be mugged, shot, murdered, hit by a car, abducted, raped, or beaten to death by some psychopath that happened to snap at that particular moment. Statistically, the scariest, most dangerous places in the world are cities. Every time you leave your house you are, quite literally, gambling with your life.

From the Author’s Note: In 2017, a migrant died every twenty-one hours along the United States-Mexico border. That number does not include the many migrants who simply disappear each year. Worldwide in 2017, as I was finishing this novel, a migrant died every ninety minutes, in the Mediterranean, in Central Americ, in the horn of Africa. Every hour and a half. So sixteen migrant deaths for each night I tuck my children into bed. When I first began my research in 2013, these estimates were difficult to find because no one was keeping track. Even now, the International Organization for Migration warns that the available statistics are “likely only a fraction of the real number of deaths” because so many migrants who vanish are never accounted for in the first place. So maybe the number is more like two hundred deaths for each load of laundry I do. There are currently around forty thousand people reported missing across Mexico, and investigators routinely find mass graves containing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bodies.

According to estimates presented by scientists from across the globe at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016, of the fifty-five lakh deaths caused by air pollution in 2013, over half were in India and China. India alone accounted for fourteen lakh of those deaths. Air pollution, scientists say, is the fourth-highest risk factor for death globally, after high blood pressure, poor diet and cigarettes. We can only hope that the dying poor of the tribal regions are at least counted in these statistics.

So, instead, we are supplied with a constant stream of propaganda telling us about the righteous contempt that the people feel for the corrupt political class, which only serves to weaken the position of politicians still further, which in turn leads to a new round of gauntlet-running in the media. This process continues in a vicious circle, the inevitable culmination of which is the death of representative democracy, the complete impotence of politicians, and a hyper-real media dictatorship. This process is strengthened by feedback. Through the use of opinion polls, whose questions are obviously phrased by the media to serve their own purposes, the population is told what it thinks, and what it is “natural” to think. Then the media go on to show how adaptable politicians are adapting to this norm, or are allowing themselves to be adapted, and so the process goes on and on, ad infinitum. The investigations of the mass-media are, on their most profound level, investigations into the mass-media themselves. Statistics which purport to represent public opinion are actually the tools used by the media to manufacture opinion.

A man who marries a woman inferior to himself i.e. 'adopts' her must expect that she cannot feel anything for him but liking and gratitude. A woman is better off than a child, after all; if necessary, she can take care of herself, like any man. That she nevertheless allows her husband to pay all the bills is a personal concession that can be retracted at any time. She is entitled, therefore, to high expectations: everything done for her must be first-rate, otherwise she may engage another protector or else, depending upon circumstances, even decide to take care of herself. Compared with the real father, a wife's 'adopted father' has no hope of becoming his pseudo-child's protege in his old age, either. The most he can hope for is the status of an inadequate or pseudo-protege i.e. if he is lucky, he may come to enjoy the woman's altruistic love, her charity. The woman even gets a reward: she inherits his property, his insurance, his pension rights, so that he can go on providing for her after his death, the death she is statistically prepared to survive for, on the average, six years, plus the number of years she is younger than he is.

Statistically, maybe. And linguistically. With a little sociology thrown in. Plus a deep and innate understanding of human nature. Think about the number two hundred. Sounds like a nice round figure, but it isn’t, really. No one says two hundred purely at random. People say a hundred, or a thousand. Or hundreds or thousands. Two hundred deaths sounds specific to me. Like a true number. Maybe rounded up from the high 180s or 190s, but it sounds to me like there’s information behind it. Enough to keep me interested, anyway. For instance. Speaking as an investigator.” Westwood said nothing.

But there was something in the scythe’s eyes that said otherwise. So Rowan pressed. “There’s more to it, isn’t there?” The scythe sighed. He didn’t have to say anything—he was, after all, a scythe, above the law in every way. He owed no one an explanation. But he chose to give one anyway. “Removing old age from the equation, statistics from the Age of Mortality cite 7 percent of deaths as being automobile-related. Of those, 31 percent involved the use of alcohol, and of those, 14 percent were teenagers.” Then he tossed Rowan a small calculator from the principal’s desk. “Figure it out yourself.

Are the religious individuals in a society more moral than the secular ones? Many researchers have looked into this, and the main finding is that there are few interesting findings. There are subtle effects here and there: some studies find, for instance, that the religious are slightly more prejudiced, but this effect is weak when one factors out other considerations, such as age and political attitudes, and exists only when religious belief is measured in certain ways. The only large effect is that religious Americans give more to charity (including nonreligious charities) than atheists do. This holds even when one controls for demographics (religious Americans are more likely than average to be older, female, southern, and African American). To explore why this relationship exists, the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell asked people about life after death, the importance of God to morality, and various other facets of religious belief. It turns out that none of their answers to such questions were related to behaviors having to do with volunteering and charitable giving. Rather, participation in the religious community was everything. As Putnam and Campbell put it, “Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness.… In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.” This importance of community, and the irrelevance of belief, extends as well to the nastier effects of religion. The psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues found a strong relationship between religiosity and support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, and, again, the key factor was religious community, not religious belief: mosque attendance predicted support for suicide attacks; frequency of prayer did not. Among Indonesian Muslims, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, Russian Orthodox in Russia, Israeli Jews, and Indian Hindus, frequency of religious attendance (but again, not frequency of prayer) predicts responses to questions such as “I blame people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world.

The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism” as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts. Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.

But our Edenic tent–God doesn’t just want to save us. He actually wants to be with us. He doesn’t just love us. God actually likes us. So God removes His royal robes and steps down from His throne to experience—for the first time—what it is like to be human. God is omniscient, which means that He is all-knowing. There’s nothing in the universe, no piece of information, no fact, no statistic that He doesn’t know. The hairs on your head, the zits on your face—He knows about every one. But until the incarnation, God hadn’t experienced human nature. Since zits aren’t a sin, perhaps Jesus had them too. God knows every hair on your head, but through the incarnation, God knows what it feels like to have hair ripped out. God knows about tiredness, but through the incarnation, He experiences exhaustion. God knows how many molecules it takes to shoot a hunger pain from your stomach to your brain. But through the incarnation, God knows what it feels like to starve to the point of death. Through the incarnation, God has enjoyed the same warm wave of sunlight that splashes across your face on the first day of spring. When you bathe in it, God smiles because He’s bathed in it too. He’s been refreshed by a night’s sleep after a long day of work. Warmed by a toasty bed on a cold winter night. Enjoyed a rich glass of wine while celebrating among friends. God authored creation. But through the incarnation, God experienced creation. And He encountered joy under the bridge. He also experienced pain. Relational, psychological, emotional, and physical agony. God has suffered the misery and brokenness of the same sin-saturated world that oppresses us every day. The pain of being rejected, beaten, abused, unloved, uncared for, mocked, shamed, spat upon, and disrespected as an image bearer of the Creator. Jesus knows all of this. He’s experienced all of this. And He willingly endured it to bring you back to Eden.

The neoliberals have always portrayed their proposals as attempts to embed freedom and liberal democracy. And yet, when people have not chosen the right outcome, neoliberal policies have been forced upon them anyways. The divide between authoritarian statist societies and democratic market ones, which was emphasized by thinkers like Hayek, turns out not to be much of a divide at all. Whether by frustrating democracy, or by supporting authoritarianism, capital tends to find a way to bend the state - and the market- to its will. In fact, all over the world, neoliberal thinkers have supported authoritarian regimes in the name of 'freedom

A more serious consequence of the illusion of control is revealed in our preference for driving over flying. At least part of this irrational—from a survival point of view—habit is due to the fact that we “feel in control” when driving, but not when flying. The probability of dying in a cross-country flight is approximately equal to the probability of dying in a 12-mile drive— in many cases, the most dangerous part of the trip is over when you reach the airport (Sivak & Flannagan, 2003). Gerd Gigerenzer (2006) estimates that the post-9/11 shift from flying to driving in the United States resulted in an additional 1,500 deaths, beyond the original 3,000 immediate victims of the terrorist attacks.

According to a 2000 New York Times study of 100 "rampage" mass murders, where 425 people were killed and 510 injured, the killers: 1. Often have serious mental health issues 2. Are not usually motivated by exposure to videos, movies, or television 3. Are not using alcohol or other drugs at the time of the attacks 4. Are often unemployed 5. Are sometimes female 6. Are not usually Satanists or racists 7. Are most often white males although a few are Asian or African American 8. Sometimes have college degrees or some years of college 9. Often have military experience 10. Give lots of pre-attack warning signals 11. Often carry semiautomatic weapons obtained legally 12. Often do no attempt escape 13. Half commit suicide or are killed by others 14. Most have a death wish (Fessenden, 2000)

Two months before the funeral, the real estate website Redfin looked at the statistics and concluded that 83 percent of California's homes, and 100 percent of San Francisco's, were unaffordable on a teacher's salary. What happens to a place where the most vital workers cannot afford to live in it? Displacement has contributed to deaths, particularly of the elderly - and many in their eighties and nineties have been targeted with eviction from their homes of many decades. In the two years since Nieto's death, there have been multiple stories of seniors who died during or immediately after their eviction. A survey reported that 71 percent of the homeless in San Francisco used to be housed there. Losing their homes makes them vulnerable to a host of conditions, some of them deadly. Gentrification can be fatal.

What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’ There is an obvious response to this: doesn’t it rather depend on which corpse you consider interesting in the first place? Yes, a little over 5,000 years ago someone walking through the Alps left the world of the living with an arrow in his side; but there’s no particular reason to treat Ötzi as a poster child for humanity in its original condition, other than, perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument. But if all we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosen the much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (after the Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a moment to consider what it would mean if we did this. Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15 Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case. When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).16 If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short. We’re not suggesting we actually do this. As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction – easy, but frankly not too enlightening.

compare that with the statistics for murderous death without bullets. The US comes twenty-fifth, the UK is twenty-seventh. And now the overall bullets and no-bullets untimely death rate. The US is seventeenth, below Slovakia and Poland. The UK is thirty-first. Less murderous than peaceful little Switzerland, though just a tidge more maniacal than New Zealand. So, statistically, you’re more likely to be murdered on the laid-back holiday haven of Barbados than in America, with or without a gun. There are other ways of looking at this list. Eight of the top ten gun-crime countries are from the New World, and so speak Spanish, the language of inarticulate anger. All are notably religious, and all predominantly Christian, though half-and-half Catholic and Protestant. Perhaps more telling is that all of them were colonies.

The states with fewer men’s deaths, Campbell tells the audience, are the states with good police responses, with good laws of protection, with decent resources for victims. In other words, Campbell says, “Abused women feel less like there’s no way out except to kill him.” In fact, since 1976 rates of men killed by women have dropped by nearly three-quarters.2 What she means is that there are states where abused women don’t have to resort to murdering their abusers to return to freedom. While there are no national statistics, some states collect this data. In New York, for example, two-thirds of incarcerated women in 2005 had been abused beforehand by the person they killed.3 Though in many states today, still, victims are barred from using their long histories of enduring violence at the hands of their partners in their own defense.

As the philosopher George Santayana once quipped, “Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.” When it comes to health news, a dose of incredulity is especially necessary because science and journalism are no less susceptible to humanity’s flaws than other endeavors. Unfortunately for those who wanted to hear they were better off not exercising than running, the Copenhagen City Heart Study offered more truthiness than truth. Although the researchers sampled more than a thousand runners, only eighty (7 percent) engaged in strenuous exercise, and of that tiny sample only two died during the study. In addition, the researchers never looked at cause of death, making no distinction between traffic accidents and heart attacks. You don’t need a degree in statistics to realize the study’s conclusions were meaningless and misleading.

In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination. In the midst of it were the prisoners of war. Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.* Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died.* By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate. In accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese massacred all 5,000 Korean captives on Tinian, all of the POWs on Ballale, Wake, and Tarawa, and all but 11 POWs at Palawan. They were evidently about to murder all the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down. On the morning of September 2, 1945, Japan signed its formal surrender. The Second World War was over.

There are subtler ways of killing. Call it death by statistics. Today, white man lets his statistics do the killing for him. Indian reservations in South Dakota have the highest rates of poverty and unemployment and the highest rates of infant mortality and teenage suicide, along with the lowest standard of living and the lowest life expectancy — barely forty years! — in the country. Those statistics amount to genocide. Genocide also disguises itself in the form of poor health facilities and wretched housing and inadequate schooling and rampant corruption. Our remaining lands, eyed by a thousand local schemers only too eager to stir up trouble and division on the reservation, continue to be sold off acre by acre to pay off tribal and individual debts. No square inch of our ever-shrinking territory seems beyond the greedy designs of those who would drive us into nonexistence.

The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?” No. Medical statistics not only describe numbers such as mean survival, they measure our confidence in our numbers, with tools like confidence levels, confidence intervals, and confidence bounds. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbable but still plausible outcome—a survival just above the measured 95 percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional”? Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average?

It was now that Rieux and his friends came to realize how exhausted they were. Indeed, the workers in the sanitary squads had given up trying to cope with their fatigue. Rieux noticed the change coming over his associates, and himself as well, and it took the form of a strange indifference to everything. Men, for instance, who hitherto had shown a keen interest in every scrap of news concerning the plague now displayed none at all. Rambert, who had been temporarily put in charge of a quarantine station—his hotel had been taken over for this purpose—could state at any moment the exact number of persons under his observation, and every detail of the procedure he had laid down for the prompt evacuation of those who suddenly developed symptoms of the disease was firmly fixed in his mind. The same was true of the statistics of the effects of anti-plague inoculations on the persons in his quarantine station. Nevertheless, he could not have told you the week’s total of plague deaths, and he could not even

Differences between experts and the public are explained in part by biases in lay judgments, but Slovic draws attention to situations in which the differences reflect a genuine conflict of values. He points out that experts often measure risks by the number of lives (or life-years) lost, while the public draws finer distinctions, for example between “good deaths” and “bad deaths,” or between random accidental fatalities and deaths that occur in the course of voluntary activities such as skiing. These legitimate distinctions are often ignored in statistics that merely count cases. Slovic argues from such observations that the public has a richer conception of risks than the experts do. Consequently, he strongly resists the view that the experts should rule, and that their opinions should be accepted without question when they conflict with the opinions and wishes of other citizens. When experts and the public disagree on their priorities, he says, “Each side must respect the insights and intelligence of the other.

What are the health effects of the choice between austerity and stimulus? Today there is a vast natural experiment being conducted on the body economic. It is similar to the policy experiments that occurred in the Great Depression, the post-communist crisis in eastern Europe, and the East Asian Financial Crisis. As in those prior trials, health statistics from the Great Recession reveal the deadly price of austerity—a price that can be calculated not just in the ticks to economic growth rates, but in the number of years of life lost and avoidable deaths. Had the austerity experiments been governed by the same rigorous standards as clinical trials, they would have been discontinued long ago by a board of medical ethics. The side effects of the austerity treatment have been severe and often deadly. The benefits of the treatment have failed to materialize. Instead of austerity, we should enact evidence-based policies to protect health during hard times. Social protection saves lives. If administered correctly, these programs don’t bust the budget, but—as we have shown throughout this book—they boost economic growth and improve public health. Austerity’s advocates have ignored evidence of the health and economic consequences of their recommendations. They ignore it even though—as with the International Monetary Fund—the evidence often comes from their own data. Austerity’s proponents, such as British Prime Minister David Cameron, continue to write prescriptions of austerity for the body economic, in spite of evidence that it has failed. Ultimately austerity has failed because it is unsupported by sound logic or data. It is an economic ideology. It stems from the belief that small government and free markets are always better than state intervention. It is a socially constructed myth—a convenient belief among politicians taken advantage of by those who have a vested interest in shrinking the role of the state, in privatizing social welfare systems for personal gain. It does great harm—punishing the most vulnerable, rather than those who caused this recession.

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 percent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 percent of naval personnel. Japanese formations committed against the Americans and British in 1944–45 lost far more heavily—the overall statistics are distorted by the fact that throughout the war a million of Hirohito’s soldiers remained in China, where they suffered relatively modest losses. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth

On September 1, 1969, for example, members of the 196th Infantry Brigade in Quang Tin Province spotted a group of Vietnamese. Officers and sergeants, peering through binoculars, conferred about the situation. After about ten minutes of observation the senior officer, Captain David Janca, ordered his machine gunners to open fire and called in an artillery fire mission. A small patrol was then dispatched to the kill zone. “Upon arrival,” assistant machine gunner Robert Gray said later, “we found dead and wounded Vietnamese children.”28 Patrol member Welkie Louie described the scene: “I observed about four to six Vietnamese children lying in one pile, dead. About five meters from this position were two or three wounded Vietnamese children huddled together.”29 Afterward, artillery forward observer Robert Wolz told army investigators that he saw an official document in which “the dead were listed as VC.”30 Another report even referred to them as “NVA”—that is, North Vietnamese army troops.31 In death, this small group of children had morphed into guerrillas and then into uniformed enemy soldiers as the body count wound its way through the military’s statistics generation machine.

For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization—that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect—in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop. The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.

HUNGER AND OBESITY The change in diets around the world is also creating a global obesity epidemic—and in its wake a global diabetes epidemic—even as more than 900 million people in the world still suffer from chronic hunger. In the United States, where many global trends begin, the weight of the average American has increased by approximately twenty pounds in the last forty years. A recent study projects that half the adult population of the United States will be obese by 2030, with one quarter of them “severely obese.” At a time when hunger and malnutrition are continuing at still grossly unacceptable levels in poor countries around the world (and in some pockets within developed countries), few have missed the irony that simultaneously obesity is at record levels in developed countries and growing in many developing countries. How could this be? Well, first of all, it is encouraging to note that the world community has been slowly but steadily decreasing the number of people suffering from chronic hunger. Secondly, on a global basis, obesity has more than doubled in the last thirty years. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1.5 billion adults above the age of twenty are overweight, and more than a third of them are classified as obese. Two thirds of the world’s population now live in countries where more people die from conditions related to being obese and overweight than from conditions related to being underweight. Obesity represents a major risk factor for the world’s leading cause of death—cardiovascular diseases, principally heart disease and stroke—and is the major risk factor for diabetes, which has now become the first global pandemic involving a noncommunicable disease.* Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to suffer heart disease or a stroke, and approximately two thirds of those suffering from diabetes die from either stroke or heart disease.† The tragic increase in obesity among children is particularly troubling; almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese today, as are almost 7 percent of all children in the world. One respected study indicates that 77 percent of obese children will suffer from obesity as adults. If there is any good news in the latest statistics, it is that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. appears to be reaching a plateau, though the increases in childhood obesity ensure that the epidemic will continue to grow in the future, both in the U.S. and globally. The causes of this surge in obesity are both simple—in that people are eating too much and exercising

It seems that the first obligation mothering places upon a woman,' writes psychoanalyst Jana Malamud Smith, 'is the demand not just that she attempt to keep the child alive, but that she accept the fact of living closely with death.' American mothers tend to respond to this inherent fact by going into overdrive on the American belief that death can be fought with righteous fervor: with organics, sustainably made wooden blocks painted with non-toxic vegetable dyes, a 4-1 preschool teacher ration, bathtub spout covers. What is lost, thinking always of risk, aiming always for zero risk, is not measurable. There are no statistics, no charts, no metrics. There is a gecko in a cage with a heat lamp for a sun. There is a dog who has never been let off leash. There is no rain in the mouth. There is no solitude, no wandering to the edge of the woods at dusk. There is no unwashed fruit eaten with dirty hands. There is no mess. There is no staking of oneself, one's small life, against the hugeness of the world. There is no sharing a meal with a stranger. Jane Hirshfield wrote, 'As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty/ We become our choices.' The greatest deception of the obsessive pursuit of zero risk is that we have no choice. We choose, often under immense pressure. And when we choose imagined safety every single time, we gradually give up what makes life worth living.

In general, love stories end badly. You’ve known this for as long as you can remember--but that’s not all. You’ve also repeatedly been told you’re going to fall in love several times, and so how could the first man be the right one? You’ve been warned endlessly that there will be temptations along the way. And that’s without taking into account that he, too, will have no shortage of options. Yes, it’s all true. Statistically speaking, you’re (far) more likely to break up with him than to love him till death do you part. If he doesn’t call you back, then he wasn’t worth it. He’ll find someone he is more suited to. And so much the better--for you both. But it’s the exception that makes the rule--and isn’t life the sum of these exceptions? You can never be absolutely sure (in love or, for that matter, in anything), and the perfect man doesn’t exist: they all need to be wrong for the one to be right. Love is the only part of your life in which you truly have no choice. The good news is that over the course of your various liaisons--and incidentally all your not-so-glorious moments-- you have learned to truly know yourself, to be strong and independent, to get by on your own. And so you don’t need anyone else to be happy. But you have to admit that, with him, it’s better. In Paris, like anywhere else, it’s good to know how to look beyond your preconceptions, in order to become a girl in love

If you can’t make a good prediction, it is very often harmful to pretend that you can. I suspect that epidemiologists, and others in the medical community, understand this because of their adherence to the Hippocratic oath. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession.88 That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologist does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to be appropriately cautious. In their field, stupid models kill people. It has a sobering effect. There is something more to be said, however, about Chip Macal’s idea of “modeling for insights.” The philosophy of this book is that prediction is as much a means as an end. Prediction serves a very central role in hypothesis testing, for instance, and therefore in all of science.89 As the statistician George E. P. Box wrote, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be. As another mathematician said, “The best model of a cat is a cat.”91 Everything else is leaving out some sort of detail. How pertinent that detail might be will depend on exactly what problem we’re trying to solve and on how precise an answer we require.

Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.

How I Got That Name Marilyn Chin an essay on assimilation I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be," without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea, when my father the paperson in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blond transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.” And nobody dared question his initial impulse—for we all know lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency. And there I was, a wayward pink baby, named after some tragic white woman swollen with gin and Nembutal. My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.” She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot” for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance, flanked by loving children and the “kitchen deity.” While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash— a gambler, a petty thug, who bought a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon, with bootlegged Gucci cash. Nobody dared question his integrity given his nice, devout daughters and his bright, industrious sons as if filial piety were the standard by which all earthly men are measured. * Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons! How we’ve managed to fool the experts in education, statistic and demography— We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning. Indeed, they can use us. But the “Model Minority” is a tease. We know you are watching now, so we refuse to give you any! Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots! The further west we go, we’ll hit east; the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China. History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach— where life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow, but whether or not our new lover in the final episode of “Santa Barbara” will lean over a scented candle and call us a “bitch.” Oh God, where have we gone wrong? We have no inner resources! * Then, one redolent spring morning the Great Patriarch Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven and saw that his descendants were ugly. One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd. A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry. And I, his least favorite— “not quite boiled, not quite cooked," a plump pomfret simmering in my juices— too listless to fight for my people’s destiny. “To kill without resistance is not slaughter” says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death. The fact that this death is also metaphorical is testament to my lethargy. * So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong, granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch” and the brooding Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G.G. Chin the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everbody and forgotten by all. She was neither black nor white, neither cherished nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo grove minding her poetry— when one day heaven was unmerciful, and a chasm opened where she stood. Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole. She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!

It was like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically, statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it’s a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbor and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; actually it’s a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh... The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place… At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which are null and void. Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men struggled to earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a stone forest the center of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead center, in the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have meaning… Everybody and everything is a part of life... As an individual, as flesh and blood, I am leveled down each day to make the fleshless, bloodless city whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream. I am struggling against an oceanic death in which my own death is but a drop of water evaporating. To raise my own individual life but a fraction of an inch above this sinking sea of death I must have a faith greater than Christ’s, a wisdom deeper than that of the greatest seer. I must have the ability and the patience to formulate what is not contained in the language of our time, for what is now intelligible is meaningless. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling. The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth. Infinitely better, as life moves toward a deathly perfection, to be just a bit of breathing space, a stretch of green, a little fresh air, a pool of water. Better also to receive men silently and to enfold them, for there is no answer to make while they are still frantically rushing to turn the corner.

Nobody as yet had really acknowledged to himself what the disease connoted. Most people were chiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests. They were worried and irritated—but these are not feelings with which to confront plague. Their first reaction, for instance, was to abuse the authorities. The Prefect’s riposte to criticisms echoed by the press—Could not the regulations be modified and made less stringent?—was somewhat unexpected. Hitherto neither the newspapers nor the Ransdoc Information Bureau had been given any official statistics relating to the epidemic. Now the Prefect supplied them daily to the bureau, with the request that they should be broadcast once a week. In this, too, the reaction of the public was slower than might have been expected. Thus the bare statement that three hundred and two deaths had taken place in the third week of plague failed to strike their imagination. For one thing, all the three hundred and two deaths might not have been due to plague. Also, no one in the town had any idea of the average weekly death-rate in ordinary times. The population of the town was about two hundred thousand. There was no knowing if the present death-rate were really so abnormal. This is, in fact, the kind of statistics that nobody ever troubles much about—notwithstanding that its interest is obvious. The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison. It was only as time passed and the steady rise in the death-rate could not be ignored that public opinion became alive to the truth. For in the fifth week there were three hundred and twenty-one deaths, and three hundred and forty-five in the sixth. These figures, anyhow, spoke for themselves. Yet they were still not sensational enough to prevent our townsfolk, perturbed though they were, from persisting in the idea that what was happening was a sort of accident, disagreeable enough, but certainly of a temporary order. So they went on strolling about the town as usual and sitting at the tables on café terraces. Generally speaking, they did not lack courage, bandied more jokes than lamentations, and made a show of accepting cheerfully unpleasantnesses that obviously could be only passing. In short, they kept up appearances.

In Vietnam, lying became so much part of the system that sometimes not lying seemed immoral...The teenage adrenaline-drained patrol leader has to call in the score so analysts, newspaper reporters, and politicians back in Washington have something to do. Never mind that Smithers and his squad may have stopped a developing attack planned to hit the company that night, saving scores of lives and maintaining control over a piece of ground. All they'll be judged on, and all their superiors have to be judged on, is the kill ratio. Smithers's best friend has just been killed. Two other friends are missing pieces of their bodies and are going into shock. No one in the squad knows if the enemy is 15 meters away waiting to open up again or running. Smithers is tired and has a lot of other things on his mind. With scorekeepers often 25 kilometers away, no one is going to check on the score. In short, Smithers has a great incentive to lie. He also has a great need to lie. His best friend is dead. "Why?" he asks himself. This is where the lying in Vietnam all began. It had to fill the long silence following Smithers's anguished "Why?" So it starts. "Nelson, how many did you get?" Smithers asks. PFC Nelson looks up from crying over the body of his friend Katz and says, "How the fuck do I know?" His friend Smithers says, "Well, did you get that bastard that came around the dogleg after Katz threw the Mike-26?" Nelson looks down at Katz's face, hardening and turning yellow like tallow. "You're goddamn right I got him," he almost whispers. It's all he can offer his dead friend. "There's no body." "They drug the fucker away. I tell you I got him!" Nelson is no longer whispering. … The patrol leader doesn't have a body, but what are the odds that he's going to call his friend a liar or, even more difficult, make Katz's death meaningless, given that the only meaning now lies in this one statistic? No one is congratulating him for exposing the enemy, keeping them screened from the main body, which is the purpose of security patrols. He calls in one confirmed kill. ... Just then PFC Schroeder comes crawling over with Kool-Aid stains all around his mouth and says, "I think I got one, right by the dogleg of the trail after Katz threw the grenade." "Yeah, we called that one in." "No, it ain't the one Nelson got. I tell you I got another one." Smithers thinks it was the same one but he's not about to have PFC Schroeder feeling bad, particularly after they've all seen their squad mate die. … the last thing on Smithers's mind is the integrity of meaningless numbers. The message gets relayed to the battalion commander. He's just taken two wounded and one dead. All he has to report is one confirmed, one probable. This won't look good. Bad ratio. He knows all sorts of bullets were flying all over the place. It was a point-to-point contact, so no ambush, so the stinkin' thinking' goes round and round, so the probable had to be a kill. But really if we got two confirmed kills, there was probably a probable. I mean, what's the definition of probable if it isn't probable to get one? What the hell, two kills, two probables. Our side is now ahead. Victory is just around the corner. … [then the artillery has to claim their own additional kills…] By the time all this shit piles up at the briefing in Saigon, we've won the war.

The English mystery writer Agatha Christie often used a fictional village, St Mary Mead, as a microcosm of all mankind. Framingham is the American epidemiologist's English village. Under sharp, statistical lenses, its captive cohort has lived, reproduced, aged, and died, affording a rare glimpse of the natural history of life, disease, and death.

digging when she got back. It was estimated that there were more than eight thousand people sleeping rough on the streets of London. And last year more than six hundred deaths of homeless people were recording across the country. More than a hundred of those were in London alone. And those were just the ones who were found. She wondered how many died and never got recorded — how many slipped through the cracks and weren’t added to the statistics.  More than a quarter of a million people were reported missing every year in the UK, and these numbers were growing. Twenty-eight missing kids, though. She looked at the files. They had nothing in common other than that they were young, and someone, somewhere, was wondering where they were. How many were dead already?  ‘Johansson,’ Roper said, his voice hard. ‘Hmm?’ She looked up, still in her chair. ‘I asked what you’d been doing all morning?

Sensitive to the fact that numerous factors besides race can influence the decision making of prosecutors, judges, and juries, Baldus and his colleagues subjected the raw data to highly sophisticated statistical analysis to see if nonracial factors might explain the disparities. Yet even after accounting for thirty-five nonracial variables, the researchers found that defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. Black defendants, like McCleskey, who killed white victims had the highest chance of being sentenced to death in Georgia.53

For the first time, we could calculate the six-year total for the entire state. There were two ways to do it. Simply add up all the pills the pharmacies bought. Or add up each distributor’s deliveries to every county. Both methods produced the same number—780 million. That was just hydrocodone and oxycodone—in a state with fewer than 1.8 million people. During those same years, 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, according to data sent to me by epidemiologists at the state Health Statistics Center.

The UN report was not yet done depressing me. The next section revealed that over 100 million children of primary-school age were not enrolled in school. One hundred million. Mao once said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.

Today it continues to be one of the most serious of human afflictions, despite the fact that it is both preventable and treatable. In 2017 the cautious statistics of WHO indicated that half of the world’s population—3.2 billion people—were at risk of contracting the disease, which in 2017 sickened 219 million people and killed 435,000 in 106 countries.

countries. The United States has a notoriously high infant mortality rate for a rich country—6.1 deaths per thousand live births in 2010. In Finland, by comparison, it is just 2.3. But it turns out that physicians in America, like those in the UK’s Midlands, seem to be far more likely to record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, than as a late miscarriage.

In fact, about 60 percent of gun deaths in the United States are suicides, not homicides or rare accidents.

Genghis Khan could well have killed five hundred million men, but it means nothing more than an interesting statistic to the next generation. The death count is another figure on a printed page, and with a little effort, the page can be turned over.

France was the next country to be overrun. The plague arrived at Marseilles a month or two after it reached the mainland of Italy. Through 1348, it moved across the country, advancing on two main lines, toward Bordeaux in the west and Paris in the north. The fate of Perpignan, just north of the Spanish border, illustrates vividly what happened in many of the smaller cities. The disruption of everyday commercial life is shown by statistics of loans made by the Jews of Perpignan to their Christian co-citizens. In January 1348, there were sixteen such loans, in February, twenty-five, in March, thirty-two. There were eight in the first eleven days of April, three in the rest of the month, and then no more until August 12.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal. Line infections are so common that they are considered a routine complication. ICUs put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that after ten days 4 percent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States and are fatal between 5 and 28 percent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care. And this is just one of many risks. After ten days with a urinary catheter, 4 percent of American ICU patients develop a bladder infection. After ten days on a ventilator, 6 percent develop bacterial pneumonia, resulting in death 40 to 45 percent of the time. All in all, about half of ICU patients end up experiencing a serious complication, and once that occurs the chances of survival drop sharply.

But the numbers on marriage just don't crunch. Did you know that, statistically, murdering someone is a safer bet than marrying them?

War? It is not so terrible! The death of a man is indeed appalling, but one hundred thousand deaths is a statistic.

How,” the Autumn King asked no one in particular. “How?” It was the ancient Prime of the wolves who answered, his withered voice rising above the pinging of the graph. “With the strength of the most powerful force in the world. The most powerful force in any realm.” He pointed to the screen. “What brings loyalty beyond death, undimming despite the years. What remains unwavering in the face of hopelessness.” The Autumn King twisted toward the ancient Prime, shaking his head. Still not understanding. Bryce was at the level of ordinary witches now. But still too far from life. Motion caught Declan’s eye, and he whirled toward the feed of the Old Square. Wreathed in lightning, healed and whole, Hunt Athalar was kneeling over Bryce’s dead body. Pumping her torso with his hands—chest compressions. Hunt hissed to Bryce through his gritted teeth, thunder cracking above him, “I heard what you said.” Pump, pump, pump went his powerful arms. “What you waited to admit until I was almost dead, you fucking coward.” His lightning surged into her, sending her body arcing off the ground as he tried to jump-start her heart. He snarled in her ear, “Now come say it to my face.” Sabine whispered a sentence to the room, to the Autumn King, and Declan’s heart rose, hearing it. It was the answer to the ancient Prime’s words. To the Autumn King’s question of how, against every statistic blaring on Declan’s computer, they were even witnessing Hunt Athalar fight like Hel to keep Bryce Quinlan’s heart beating. Through love, all is possible.

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand a statistic.

It was the ancient Prime of the wolves who answered, his withered voice rising above the pinging of the graph. “With the strength of the most powerful force in the world. The most powerful force in any realm.” He pointed to the screen. “What brings loyalty beyond death, undimming despite the years. What remains unwavering in the face of hopelessness.” The Autumn King twisted toward the ancient Prime, shaking his head. Still not understanding. Bryce was at the level of ordinary witches now. But still too far from life. Motion caught Declan’s eye, and he whirled toward the feed of the Old Square. Wreathed in lightning, healed and whole, Hunt Athalar was kneeling over Bryce’s dead body. Pumping her torso with his hands—chest compressions. Hunt hissed to Bryce through his gritted teeth, thunder cracking above him, “I heard what you said.” Pump, pump, pump went his powerful arms. “What you waited to admit until I was almost dead, you fucking coward.” His lightning surged into her, sending her body arcing off the ground as he tried to jump-start her heart. He snarled in her ear, “Now come say it to my face.” Sabine whispered a sentence to the room, to the Autumn King, and Declan’s heart rose, hearing it. It was the answer to the ancient Prime’s words. To the Autumn King’s question of how, against every statistic blaring on Declan’s computer, they were even witnessing Hunt Athalar fight like Hel to keep Bryce Quinlan’s heart beating. Through love, all is possible.

A million deaths really is just a statistic at the level of our moral cognition. This dumbfounding-by-numbers blindspot of our minds is one we must make arduous efforts to control for if we are to have an accurate sense of the scope and moral importance of the suffering of the world.

Clearly, if one can’t prove that the coronavirus even exists and that the testing for this imaginary virus is bogus, then the world has been led wildly astray. If the test for the coronavirus is inaccurate and misleading, as is the case, then there are no grounds for believing the reports about the number of Covid-19 cases, the number of Covid-19 deaths, or any other statistics coming from the orthodox medical institutions. If the testing is bogus, then the coronavirus emperor has no clothes.

It’s no coincidence that the increases in suicides and toxicology rates with THC in Colorado teens are correlated. As a mother, I want the world to know my son isn’t just a statistic. He mattered. There is a reason Johnny died—and it is marijuana.

One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” “Joseph Stalin,” Yanni said.

It was funny how we needed an explanation for another's early death, equating it to some lack of judgment, so we can cross ourselves off the list of potential cancer acquirers. Don't smoke, do eat lots of fruits and vegetables, don't drink, do yoga. So we can tell ourselves with some frail reassurance that we're immune. Or even better: it strikes one out of eight, she has it, so statistically I won't get it.

First published in 2020 this book contains over 560 easily readable compact entries in systematic order augmented by an extensive bibliography, an alphabetical list of countries and locations of individuals final resting places (where known) and a day and month list in consecutive order of when an individual died. It details the deaths of individuals, who died too early and often in tragic circumstances, from film, literature, music, theatre, and television, and the achievements they left behind. In addition, some ordinary people who died in bizarre, freak, or strange circumstances are also included. It does not matter if they were famous or just celebrated by a few individuals, all the people in this book left behind family, friends and in some instances devotees who idolised them. Our heartfelt thoughts and sympathies go out to all those affected by each persons death. Whether you are concerned about yourself, a loved one, a friend, or a work colleague there are many helplines and support groups that offer confidential non-judgemental help, guidance and advice on mental health problems (such as anxiety, bereavement, depression, despair, distress, stress, substance abuse, suicidal feelings, and trauma). Support can be by phone, email, face-to-face counselling, courses, and self-help groups. Details can be found online or at your local health care organisation. There are many conspiracy theories, rumours, cover-ups, allegations, sensationalism, and myths about the cause of some individual’s deaths. Only the facts known at the time of writing are included in this book. Some important information is deliberately kept secret or undisclosed. Sometimes not until 20 or even 30 years later are full details of an accident or incident released or in some cases found during extensive research. Similarly, unsolved murders can be reinvestigated years later if new information becomes known. In some cases, 50 years on there are those who continue to investigate what they consider are alleged cover-ups. The first name in an entry is that by which a person was generally known. Where relevant their real name is included in brackets. Date of Death | In the entry detailing the date an individual died their age at the time of their death is recorded in brackets. Final Resting Place | Where known details of a persons final resting place are included. “Unknown” | Used when there is insufficient evidence available to the authorities to establish whether an individuals’ death was due to suicide, accident or caused by another. Statistics The following statistics are derived from the 579 individual “cause of death” entries included in this publication. The top five causes of death are, Heart attack/failure 88 (15.2%) Cancer 55 (9.5%) Fatal injuries (plane crash) 43 (7.4%) Fatal injuries (vehicle crash/collision) 39 (6.7%) Asphyxiation (Suicide) 23 (4%). extract from 'Untimely and Tragic Deaths of the Renowned, The Celebrated, The Iconic

A few deaths was a crime, a multitude merely a statistic, as someone had once said, more or less.

Mathiness: British economic journalist John Kay defines mathiness as a “use of algebraic symbols and quantitative data to give an appearance of scientific content to ideological preconceptions.” Expressing an idea in mathematical symbols instead of straightforward literary terms helps legitimize it in the minds of many people, thanks to a seeming similarity with natural science. In this respect math is basically a form of numerical rhetoric. “The American economist Paul Romer has recently written of ‘mathiness,’ by analogy with ‘truthiness,’ a term coined by American talk show host Stephen Colbert. Truthiness presents narratives which are not actually true, but consistent with the world view of the person who spins the story. It is exemplified in rightwing fabrications about European health systems – their death panels and forced euthanasia.” Paul Samuelson, for instance, trivialized economics in terms that give the outward appearance of science by being expressed mathematically, even when its assumptions are purely hypothetical (and not all realistic)and there are no quantitative statistics to illustrate its categories.

I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels. A depressed country: this was an easy diagnosis to make, given the suicide statistics, which Scandinavia sometimes tries to deny, just the way Cornell University tries to allay the fears of incoming students’ parents about the famous Ithaca gorge, which, like a harvest ritual each fall, claims the life of a few more hopeless freshmen. Don’t worry, the college brochure should say. Though some students do in fact leap to their deaths, most prefer keg parties and studying. All of Scandinavia was alluring, with its ice fishing and snowcaps, but everyone knew about the legend of ingrained unhappiness among Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes: their drinking, their mournful, baying songs, their muffled darkness smack in the middle of the day.

HIV prevalence is an abstraction. the time-lag between infection with HIV and illness with AIDS is so long - eight to ten years - that a new epidemic consists mostly of symptom-less HIV infection rather than visible sickness and death from AIDS

Quantifying excess deaths is a statistical technique often employed by modern scholars studying epidemics, but it was first proposed by a founder of epidemiology, William Farr, in London in 1847. Farr defined this quantity as the number of deaths observed during an epidemic in excess of those expected under normal circumstances.

Nightingale was the first woman to be made a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. When her “slender form” wasn’t too busy gliding along the corridors, causing faces to “soften with gratitude,” she was spending her time in Scutari carefully compiling data about disease and death.

Statistically speaking, 99.9 percent safe and 1-in-1,000 risk of death are exactly the same.

I know that a silly habit has grown up in recent years of pretending that nature overshadows Man; that the destructions of a city means only an infinitesimal alteration in the death statistics of one particular kind of animal, quite unimportant as compared with the majestic upheaval that has caused it. This is cant and folly; there is nothing majestic about an earthquake unless there are men to know about it and to feel the consequences of it; there is no importance at all about a Mars-quake, if such things occur. The materialist may put up a case for saying that man does not matter; but if he proves his case it is quite certain that nothing else matters; he should be called an immaterialist for his pains.

Stories of individual animals must now be told. Not stats and population densities, but characters in stories that very much mirror our own daily struggles to survive. An individual, well loved, even heroic wolf like OR7 with whom we've so deeply identified can never be a statistic again.

One noticeable effect of studying data is the loss of a sense of humanity. Each statistic involves many people--people who die from gun violence...We are so much more than numbers. We all are individuals with names, faces, and personalities. We love and are beloved. We have families and friends. Each and every violent gun death is a trauma that numbers do not begin to touch.

As a result, levels of addiction and death were statistically low among African Americans. It appeared to be a rare instance in which systemic racism could be said to have protected the community. But people of color were disproportionately affected by the war on drugs. Purdue executives might have evaded jail time for their role in a scheme that generated billions of dollars for Madeleine’s family, but in 2016, Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, signed a law reinstating a mandatory minimum sentence for any street

Even with corrupt data collection, it became harder and harder to find enough dead people to fuel the ongoing fear pandemic, so the media pivoted and replaced daily death and hospitalization trackers with a new statistical category: “Case Numbers.

ask the doctor: “How much sleep have you had in the past twenty-four hours?” The doctor’s response will determine, to a statistically provable degree, whether the treatment you receive will result in a serious medical error, or even death.

For example, in England, prior to the introduction of mandatory vaccinations in 1953, there were two smallpox deaths per 10,000 inhabitants per year. But at the beginning of the 1970s, nearly 20 years after the introduction of mandatory vaccinations, which had led to a 98 percent vaccination rate,195 England suffered 10 smallpox deaths per 10,000 inhabitants annually; five times as many as before. “The smallpox epidemic reached its peak after vaccinations had been introduced,“ summarizes William Farr, who was responsible for compiling statistics in London.

Statistically speaking, 99.9 percent safe and 1-in-1,000 risk of death are exactly the same. But 99.9 percent safe sure sounds a lot better than having a 1-in-1,000 chance of instant death.

COVID vaccines do not protect children from hospitalization or death associated with COVID-19 because healthy children are not being hospitalized or dying with COVID-19 [NHS statistics].

Importantly, there is no similar rise among younger children aged one to fourteen, a cohort that was not vaccinated. Instead, 2020 was a low-mortality year for this age group. COVID cannot be blamed for the sudden rise in deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds in summer 2021, as the Office of National Statistics (ONS) data shows that over the period, there were only nine deaths with COVID in that age group. This real-world evidence suggests that over the summer, the vaccines killed nine times as many 15- to 19-year-olds as COVID did—eighty-one versus nine. “If not,” asks Jones, “what are the other possible explanations, and how likely are they?” Teen deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds have increased by 47 percent in the UK since they started getting the COVID-19 vaccine, according to official ONS data.101

As to his harming a human, Jeff underscores that attacks by cougars are very rare; the chance is about one in twenty-five million. You’re more likely to win the lottery or be struck by lightning than be killed by a cougar. “These are large carnivores capable of attacking people, and they deserve a healthy respect,”Jeff says, “but clearly mountain lions don’t think of people as prey, and this is good news for both people and lions. If they wanted to eat us, they would.” Jeff goes on to say that in Los Angeles, for both P-22 and people, the freeways pose the greater risk. In Los Angeles County alone, automobiles cause on average about 750 deaths and 85,000 injuries each year. In California, mountain lions have attacked fewer than twenty people and killed just three since 1986, according to the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife. These statistics don’t diminish the tragedy when a person is killed or injured by a lion, but it puts the risk in perspective. Living in lion country is much safer than living in car country.

Planners are at a disadvantage. They have inevitably come to regard “unaverage” quantities as relatively inconsequential, because these are statistically inconsequential. They have been trained to discount what is most vital.

On average, the deaths of fifteen infant girls can be avoided by allowing one hundred female fetuses to be selectively aborted. The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine "gendercide" in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.

One of the comforts of firing a big gun during a siege must be the satisfaction of watching the results at long range. Inside a tank or behind an M107, a smudge of smoke against a building can be marked off against a map coordinate. The blood and shattered bones at the other end of the trajectory have no physical contact with the gun. But Randal and I were driving towards the other end of the trajectory, back to west Beirut, where the casualty statistics marked the other side of the concave mirror through which armies fight their wars.

Do you know that most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death?" Rachel raised a skeptical brow as she spoke. "Let's just say, I've lost interest." -Being Brave Again

When I look at the statistics in more vulnerability-intolerant Viking-or-Victim professions, I see a dangerous pattern developing. And no place is this more evident than in the military. The statistics on post-traumatic-stress-related suicides, violence, addiction, and risk-taking all point to this haunting truth: For soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, coming home is more lethal than being in combat. From the invasion of Afghanistan to the summer of 2009, the US military lost 761 soldiers in combat in that country. Compare that to the 817 who took their own lives over the same period. And this number doesn’t account for deaths related to violence, high-risk behaviors, and addiction.

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn’t realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.

Estimates of the number of people killed by Stalin range from as low as twenty million to as high as sixty-two million “unnatural deaths” during Stalin’s time as Soviet leader. The man who is credited with saying that “death solves all problems” and “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic” murdered his own citizens through executions, artificial famines, forced-labor camps, incarceration, and torture.

Death is the most ordinary thing in the world, and so is birth. Someone is being born at this very moment. Someone is dying. Ordinary, and yet completely extraordinary. The marvel of having my babies is something I will never forget. The feeling of staggering uniqueness I had at the death of my father, the death of several close friends, was very different, but equally acute. Death may be an ordinary, everyday affair, but it is not a statistic. It is something that happens to people.

Then the machine started to reel off infant-mortality rates and life-expectancy figures, sex ratios, types of diseases and their prevalence in the various strata of society, average incomes, the incidence of unemployment, per capita income as a ratio of total population in given areas, birth-tax and death-tax and the penalties for abortion and illegitimate birth; it talked about laws governing types of sexual congress, about charitable payments and religious organizations running soup kitchens and night shelters and firstaid clinics; about numbers and figures and statistics and ratios all the time, and Gurgeh didn’t think he picked up a word of it.

It’s difficult to imagine that Artificial Intelligence will take the place of people but many believe that it’s only a short time before computers will outthink us. They already can beat our best chess players and have been able to out calculate us since calculators first came onto the scene. IBM’s Watson is on the cutting edge of Cognitive Computers, being used to out think our physicians but closer to home, for the greatest part; our cars are no longer assembled by people but rather robots. Our automobiles can be considered among our first robots, since they took the place of horses. Just after the turn of the last century when the population in the United States crossed the 100 M mark the number of horses came to 20M. Now we have a population of 325 M but only 9 M horses. You might ask what happened. Well back in 1915 there were 2.4 M cars but this jumped to 3.6 M in just one year. Although horses still out-numbered cars the handwriting was on the wall! You might think that this doesn’t apply to us but why not? The number of robots increase, taking the place of first our workers on the assembly line and then workers in the food industry and this takes us from tractors and combines on the farms to the cooking and serving hamburgers at your favorite burger joint. People are becoming redundant! That’s right we are becoming superfluous! Worldwide only 7 out of 100 people have college degrees and here in the United States only 40% of our working population possesses a sheep skin, although mine is printed on ordinary paper. With education becoming ever more expensive, we as a population are becoming ever more uneducated. A growing problem is that as computers and robots become smarter, as they are, we are no longer needed to be anything more than a consumer and where will the money come from for that? I recently read that this death spiral will run its course within 40 years! Nice statistics that we’re looking at…. Looking at the bright side of things you can now buy an atomically correct, life sized doll, as perhaps a robotic non-complaining, companion for under $120. In time these robotic beings will be able to talk back but hopefully there will be an off switch. As interesting as this sounds it will most likely not be for everyone, however it may appeal to some of our less capable, not to have to actually interface with real live people. The fact is that most people will soon outlive their usefulness! We as a society are being challenged and there will soon be little reason for our being. When machines make machines that can out think us; when we become dumb and superfluous, then what? Are we ready for this transition? It’s scary but If nothing else, it’s something to think about….

Beyond the deprivations, degradations, and tortures these prisoners endured, each man often recounts how he got to the camps Weller visited. These conflicts, and all they implied, would have been instantly recognizable to the 1945 public. Many of the Dutch and the British, the Australians and Canadians, were taken in the defeats of Singapore (130,000), Java (32,000), and Hong Kong (14,000). Many of the Americans got captured on Guam or Wake; or in the Philippines (75,000), to then endure the Bataan death march, on which one in four died. Some built the Siam-Burma railroad, which claimed yet another 15,000 lives, same ratio. Nearly everywhere, in a hurry, the Japanese won and the Allies lost. The United States saw its navy smashed at Pearl Harbor and its Pacific air forces wiped out in Manila, just before MacArthur got himself safely out to Australia. This litany of early military disasters added up to astonishing numbers. In a mere six months the Japanese, at a cost of only 15,000 of their own men (deaths and casualties), took 320,000 Allied soldiers out of the war, either as deaths, casualties, or prisoners; over half these were Asiatic. White prisoners, about 140,000 total over the course of the conflict, became slave labor across the growing Japanese empire. (Asiatic prisoners were often turned loose, as good propaganda among the subjugated peoples.) Japan had not signed the 1929 Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of prisoners of war, and a Japanese soldier would sooner be killed than captured: thus every enemy soldier who surrendered was a coward, a cur, a thing. Any notion of “inhumane treatment” toward a surrendered Chinese, much less a white man, was incomprehensible. White men were the foe, so their role was to work, then die. Whether their deaths proved painful did not matter to the Japanese. Unlike the Nazi POW camps, there were few escape attempts, for it was obvious to any Allied POW in Asia that a white face was an immediate giveaway even had he succeeded, and the Japanese made it clear that they would execute ten men for every man who escaped. Statistically it was seven times healthier to be a POW under the Nazis than under the Japanese. By war’s end, one out of every three white prisoners had died as their captives—“starved to death, worked to death, beaten to death, dead of loathsome epidemic diseases that the Japanese would not treat,” as Daws puts it. Another year of war and there would have been no POWs still alive. (A Japan War Ministry directive of August 1944 iterated that “the aim is to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.”)

Clinical Definitions DISTRESS: Stress that occurs from negative events. For example, the stress that occurs from experiencing the death of a loved one, getting hurt, or losing a job. EUSTRESS: Stress that occurs from positive events. For example, the stress that occurs when watching a scary movie, going on a roller coaster, or getting a job promotion. THE

Stannard begins with a stunning statistic: of the ten to twelve million native Indians who once populated the American continent, between 90 and 95 percent perished as a consequence of exposure to the white man. This is a catastrophic event, by any measure, but even so Stannard admits that most of these deaths were due to plagues and epidemics unwittingly transmitted from Europeans to the Indians. Whatever we call this, we cannot call it genocide because genocide involves the intent to exterminate a population.

two wrongs do not compensate for each other under any higher moral code; the right to life is unconditional and universal; the fear of capital punishment (e.g. for rape) may cause a criminal to kill his victim, thus removing a witness; a miscarriage of justice in wrongfully convicting and sentencing a person to death cannot be revoked; there is no statistical link between the death penalty and the reduction of criminality; and there are other and better ways to deter serious crimes.

And maybe it had to do with all the murders lately, but death was on her mind and what she had so far in regard to her graduation talk was not exactly what you would call inspiring. Life in a nutshell: we’re born, we suffer, and then we die. Heartache and grief and loneliness chase us every day, the kind of love we long for is never quite within our reach, justice eludes us, and in the end, meaning is nothing but an illusion. After all, life is an anomaly, the exception, not the norm. Death is the natural state of affairs both here and everywhere else we know of in the universe—and it’s on its way to reasserting itself. All the evidence from evolutionary biology, astrophysics, astronomy, all the theorizing in statistics and probability make it clear there’s no possible way intelligent life exists anywhere else other than on earth. Any other view is either wishful thinking or a carefully cultivated blindness. Death is the default setting of the universe. The end of life on this planet would be the end of life everywhere. And that day is coming.

It is a scandal—or, rather, it should be a scandal and one wonders why it isn’t—that the US prison population, after reaching a postwar low in the early 1970s, has since grown more than 500 percent. The United States locks up a higher percentage of its own population than any other nation in the world. Even with extraordinary prison construction projects over the last decades, the cells are still overfull. This massive expansion cannot be explained by a growing criminality of the US population or the enhanced efficiency of law enforcement. In fact, US crime rates in this period have remained relatively constant. The scandal of US prison expansion is even more dramatic when one observes how it operates along race divisions. Latinos are incarcerated at a rate almost double that of whites, and African Americans at a rate almost six times as high. The racial imbalance of those on death row is even more extreme. It is not hard to find shocking statistics. One in eight black US males in their twenties, for instance, is in jail or prison on any given day. The number of African Americans under correctional control today, Michelle Alexander points out, is greater than the number of slaves in the mid-nineteenth century. Some authors refer to the racially skewed prison expansion as a return to elements of the plantation system or the institution of new Jim Crow laws. Keep in mind that this differential racial pattern of imprisonment is not isolated to the United States. In Europe and elsewhere, if one considers immigrant detention centers and refugee camps as arms of the carceral apparatus, those with darker skin are disproportionately in captivity.

One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic,

Clip This Article on Location 1397 | Added on Monday, September 1, 2014 4:10:39 PM REVIEW & OUTLOOK An $8.3 Billion Rebuke to the FDA Roche buys a drug approved in Europe but not in America. 359 words Amid this summer's M&A fever, Roche's agreement Monday to buy the San Francisco biotech InterMune deserves special notice. The tie-up is an $8.3 billion guided missile into the fortified bunker that is the Food and Drug Administration. InterMune has never turned a profit in 16 years of existence and other than its clinical expertise the company holds a single asset: an idea for treating a lethal lung disorder called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis with no known cause, cure or approved therapy—at least in the U.S. An InterMune drug called pirfenidone that slows the progression of irreversible lung scarring is on the market in Europe, Japan, Canada and even China. Bloomberg News But the FDA refused to approve pirfenidone in 2010, despite the 40,000 Americans who are killed annually by lung fibrosis and a positive recommendation from its outside scientific advisory committee. The agency brass claimed the evidence was statistically unsatisfactory, when one clinical trial was inconclusive but another showed strong benefits such as improved lung function. The results of the third trial the FDA ordered were reported earlier this year and confirmed that pirfenidone is even more of a treatment advance than it seemed in 2010, and may prolong life. The agency is expected, finally, to approve the medicine in November. Roche is paying a 38% premium over Friday's closing share price, and 63% over trading before the news of InterMune's corporate suitors broke a few weeks ago. The deal is a big vote of confidence in pirfenidone, not least because a rival lung fibrosis drug is awaiting U.S. approval. Then again, maybe that drug's maker, the German pharmaceutical consortium Boehringer Ingelheim, will have the same FDA experience as InterMune. The Roche deal is a tacit reprimand to the FDA's unscientific and uncompassionate—and wrong—2010 defenestration. Amid medical ambiguity about effectiveness, the humane option is to allow a drug to come to patients and follow on with more research, in particular for a drug with few side effects. Pulmonary fibrosis is a protracted death sentence of three to five years. The FDA denied tens of thousands of dying people better and possibly longer lives in the time they had left. ==========

And I suppose my view is shaped by the portholes around me. Eight people probably died from slipping in their showers in the time it took me to have this thought right here of them slipping in their showers. But it’s more than the deaths I saw; it’s the destruction. The noise with which we go seems to make it count for more. I think of my buddies who checked out via hand grenade versus those who died from MRSA back in the VA. We barely notice the latter. They’re statistics. Go quietly, and you’re a number. Go in spectacular fashion, and you’re a name.

The first eye-opener came in the 1970s, when DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, organized the first large-scale speech recognition project. To everyone’s surprise, a simple sequential learner of the type Chomsky derided handily beat a sophisticated knowledge-based system. Learners like it are now used in just about every speech recognizer, including Siri. Fred Jelinek, head of the speech group at IBM, famously quipped that “every time I fire a linguist, the recognizer’s performance goes up.” Stuck in the knowledge-engineering mire, computational linguistics had a near-death experience in the late 1980s. Since then, learning-based methods have swept the field, to the point where it’s hard to find a paper devoid of learning in a computational linguistics conference. Statistical parsers analyze language with accuracy close to that of humans, where hand-coded ones lagged far behind. Machine translation, spelling correction, part-of-speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, question answering, dialogue, summarization: the best systems in these areas all use learning. Watson, the Jeopardy! computer champion, would not have been possible without it.

The attack on 9/11 was a localized event, affecting only a relatively small number of Americans. As indicated earlier, the general threat of terrorism, even factoring in the large death toll on that tragic day, produces a statistically insignificant threat to the average person’s life. People across the country, however, were gripped with fear. And because we are an object-oriented people, most felt the need to project that fear onto something. Some people stopped flying in airplanes, worried about a repeat attack—and for years afterward, air travel always dipped on the anniversary of 9/11.4 Of course, this was and is an irrational fear; it is safer to travel by plane than by car. According to the National Safety Council, in 2010 there were over 22,000 passenger deaths involving automobiles, while no one died in scheduled airline travel that year.5 Nevertheless, Congress responded by rushing through the USA PATRIOT Act six weeks after 9/11—a 240-plus page bill that was previously written, not available to the public prior to the vote, and barely available to the elected officials in Congress, none of whom read it through before casting their votes.6 Two weeks previous to the bill’s passage, President Bush had announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” He explained that “[t]he Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”7 The office’s efforts culminated in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) one year later as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This law consolidated executive branch organizations related to “homeland security” into a single Cabinet department; twenty-two total agencies became part of this new apparatus. The government, responding to the outcry from a fearful citizenry, was eager to “do something.” All of this (and much, much more), affecting all Americans, because of a localized event materially affecting only a few. But while the event directly impacted only a small percentage of the population, its impact was felt throughout the entire country.

I was not so clear on how such things can calm a person who is in recovery from a serious illness. While it is clear that in the end everyone must die, I know no one is in a hurry to get there. No one is rushing there. We all want to get to death  as late as possible. "This is the way of the world," continued Yigal quoting, in a not so clear way, what Dr S. said. "Look, Nahum," Yigal said with a frown. "He told her that even Moses died.” Yigal repeated this sentence several times and in different ways, to make sure I understood Dr. S.’s intentions. "He managed to do what others have failed to do before him, he managed to calm her down." Maybe Maggie longed for such words from an expert physician. Perhaps she expected someone from the medical staff would talk to her at eye level and explain things to her in a simple and understandable manner. She did not want to settle for dry statistics that only confused her. It seemed to me that indeed Dr. S. succeeded. He strengthened her impressively  by planting a sense of peace in her.

The media is doing quite a job of scaring people. A recent 2014 study in the journal Pediatrics received massive media attention, including extensive coverage in USA Today and an entire hour on ABC News’s 20/20.40 Here’s how ABC’s World News Tonight reported the findings:41           Looking at children and guns, the most recent statistics from 2009. And take a look tonight, they are eye-opening. The new numbers are arresting. . . . 7,391 children rushed to the hospital every year because of those gun injuries, so often accidents in the home. Four hundred and fifty-three of those children die at the hospital. The vast majority of these “children” are actually young adults. These are not little kids who accidentally hurt themselves by firing their parents’ gun. Consider these facts:          •    Seventy-six percent of these injured “children” were seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen years old.          •    Sixty-two percent of injuries were the result of criminal assaults.          •    The injuries are overwhelmingly concentrated in large, urban areas. These deaths are clearly tragic. But they are largely a result of gang violence, a problem that won’t be solved by scaring law-abiding Americans into not owning guns.

In humans, statistically, once we reach 30 years of age our chance of dying doubles approximately once every eight years. It’s as simple as that.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. For

1.10 Four Kinds of Predictive Validity for Intelligence Tests 1.10.3. Everyday Life The importance of general intelligence in everyday life often is not obvious but it is profound. As Professor Earl Hunt has pointed out, if you are a college-educated person, it is highly likely that most of your friends and acquaintances are as well. When is the last time you invited someone to your home for dinner that was not college-educated? Professor Hunt calls this cognitive segregation and it is powerful in fostering the erroneous belief that everyone has a similar capacity or potential for reasoning about daily problems and issues. Most people with high g cannot easily imagine what daily life is like for a person with low g. [...] Consider some statistics comparing low and high IQ groups (low = 75–90; high = 110–125) on relative risk of several life events. For example, the odds of being a high school dropout are 133 times more likely if you’re in the low group. People in the low group are 10 times more at risk for being a chronic welfare recipient. The risk is 7.5 times greater in the low group for incarceration, and 6.2 times more for living in poverty. Unemployment and even divorce are a bit more likely in the low group. IQ even predicts traffic accidents. In the high IQ group, the death rate from traffic accidents is about 51 per 10,000 drivers, but in the low IQ group, this almost triples to about 147. This may be telling us that people with lower IQ, on average, have a poorer ability to assess risk and may take more chances when driving or performing other activities (Gottfredson, 2002; 2003b).

About one-half of the human population carries these genes, while the other half does not, making the first half much more dangerous indeed. It’s not even a contest. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes, as do 98.4 percent of those on death row. It seems clear enough that the carriers are strongly predisposed toward a different type of behavior—and these statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.

Besides bonding, sex is also designed by God as the way we procreate and have children. Again, this is a very good part of God’s design; without it our species would cease to exist. However, kids are healthiest, happiest, safest, and most secure when they are raised by both a mother and a father within a committed, stable, God-honoring marriage. Children raised in any type of family other than with their married parents—in other words, single parents, divorced parents, stepparents, or cohabitating couples—are more likely to be poor, more likely to have behavioral or psychological problems, more likely to be abused, and less likely to graduate from high school.11 Children are a natural outcome of sex, at least part of the time. That’s true even if you try to prevent it using birth control, since no form of contraception is 100 percent effective.12 If you have sex outside of marriage, you are running the risk of having a child outside of marriage, which can be hard for you and for the innocent child. It’s important to note that all of these statistically negative outcomes for children are still far preferable to their death, which is why abortion is not the answer to pregnancy outside of marriage (or inside marriage). But many people decide that abortion is the answer when faced with those circumstances, and the tragedy of having tens of millions of children killed before birth is directly related to the modern prevalence of sex outside of marriage. It’s sick that we’ve twisted something as beautiful and wonderful as pregnancy, where new life is created, and turned it into a negative consequence to be avoided (or “terminated” if we can’t avoid it). But that’s what happens when we go against God’s design. There are consequences, for ourselves and for the people we love. “No strings attached”? There are always strings. So many strings. But let me clearly say this: I’ve been very honest about my own poor choices, and I can say from my own experience that God loves you no matter what choices you’ve made. He is not mad at you. He desires a relationship with you. You do not need to be overwhelmed with shame. You need to receive his grace and forgiveness.

The CDC utilized an even brassier canard to support President Joe Biden’s claim that 98 percent of vaccine hospitalizations and deaths were among the unvaccinated. In an August 5 video statement, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky inadvertently revealed the agency’s principal gimmick for fabricating that statistic. Walensky sheepishly admitted that CDC included hospitalization and mortality data from January through June 2021 in its calculation.76 The vast majority of the US population were, of course, unvaccinated during that time frame, so it makes sense that almost all hospitalizations would therefore be only among the unvaccinated. This is simply because there were almost no vaccinated Americans during that time period!

A single death is tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.

Although it is somewhat vague, the central tenets of the Copenhagen interpretation seem to be (1) that all we have access to are the results of observations, and so it is simply pointless to ask questions about the quantum reality behind those observations, and (2) that although observation is necessary for establishing the reality of quantum phenomena, no form of consciousness, human or otherwise, is necessary for making an observation. Rather, an observer is anything that makes a record of an event, and so it is at the level of macroscopic measuring instruments (such as Geiger counters) that the actual values of quantum phenomena are randomly set from a range of statistical possibilities.

Within a year, food production was inadequate to support the communes as agricultural workers focused on producing steel rather than farming. It is estimated that twenty to thirty million people starved to death, although detailed statistics were not kept. Sadly, reports later found that more than twenty million tons of grain were being held by the government to be exported abroad at the height of the famine. Deng Xiaoping was at the heart of the disaster. Frank Dikötter, in his book Mao’s Great Famine, blames Deng specifically for ordering the extraction of grain from starving peasants despite the domestic need.

Obviously, you did not die. Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

We can pontificate all day about statistics and percentages and death tolls and displacement numbers, easily forgetting that numbers have names and names have faces. Each face has wrinkles that make up a map filled with tragedies to tell.

We all die of something, and if you are following my argument in this chapter skeptically—as you should—that includes physically active people who eat sensibly and do everything else they are supposed to. In fact, despite being told to exercise, more inactive people like Donald Trump are living longer and in better health today than ever before. To evaluate this conundrum, let’s look closely at the probabilistic relationship between death (mortality) and illness (morbidity). Too often, statistics on aging focus on life span without also considering health span (the length of time spent in good health without morbidity). A useful way to think about both life span and health span is to graph functional capacity (a measure of health) on the y-axis versus time on the x-axis, as shown in figure 28. Someone who is generally healthy is at nearly 100 percent functional capacity most of the time, despite occasional, temporary illnesses. Then, at some point, age-related senescence commences and functional capacity declines because of serious illness, eventually leading to death.