OFF THE NEWS.

Change Is Not Always Good

Humans overindulge in the wrong diets, are over-stimulated by technology, have lifestyles that have become ever more sedentary, and are in a chronic cycle of stress.

* More than 150 million people in the United States have flat feet.

* There are billions more chairs on the planet than there are humans.

* We have grown five inches in the past two hundred years.

* Seventy percent of Americans are on prescription drugs. The pills popped each year, laid end-to-end, could orbit the planet twice.

* American feet have grown by two sizes over the past four decades.

* Our diet has changed the shape of our faces, giving us slacker jawlines, wonky teeth, and fleshy jowls.

* By the time you've finished reading this item, two people will have died of poor air quality.

from

Primate Change: How the World We Made Is Remaking Us by Vybarr Cregan-Reid (Cassell, 2018).

Next Stop Default?

"Chinese companies now hold dollar-denominated debt of roughly $450 billion, compared with almost none in 2009."

--The Economist

Yet Pessimism Is Soaring

"For the first time in recorded history, bacteria, viruses, and other infectious agents do not cause the majority of deaths or disabilities in any region of the world. Since 2003, the number of people who die each year from HIV/AIDS has fallen by more than 40 percent. Deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrheal diseases have fallen by more than 25 percent each. In 1950, there were nearly one hundred countries, including...