What Is the Country Whose Citizens Are the Most Content?

A friend sent a report on a Gallup poll about the countries that have the happiest people. Well, that’s not precisely right. It wasn’t about happiness. It was about contentment.

Many such surveys are based on objective criteria like per capita income, life expectancy, health data, and more. I always ignored them, preferring to know the subjective responses – how people feel. That’s the way this one was designed. It employed questions like “Are you at peace with yourself (a) all of the time, (b) some of the time, (c) none of the time.”

Anyway… guess which country came out on top?

The USA? Canada? France? Switzerland? Sweden?

No!

Believe it or not, it was the country that hosts the Ford family’s second home: Nicaragua!

Is that crazy? Nicaragua is usually ranked as the poorest country in Latin America and one of the 50 poorest countries in the world. It is also a country that has survived a US-supported dictatorship, a communist revolution, a leftist dictatorship, a major earthquake, constant natural disasters, and more.

You can read about it here.

(On Friday, I’ll tell you why I think Nica came out on top.)

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Will Jordan Peterson Lose His License for Wrong-Thinking?

Jordan Peterson, Canada’s best known public intellectual, is being required to submit to “re-education” therapy. The reason? Complaints about incendiary comments he’s been making on social media about, among other things, transgender and overweight people.

His controversial viewpoints have made him famous. And rich. And a bestselling author. But recently, some of his colleagues initiated a new attack against him. According to a report in the Jan. 6 issue of The Free Press, the Ontario College of Psychologists told Peterson: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.” And they informed him that if he doesn’t submit to therapy, and publicly announce that he has been a bad thinker, they may revoke his license to practice.

You can read more about this here.

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Outer Dark 

By Cormac McCarthy

256 pages

Originally published Sept. 12, 1968

Released in paperback June 29, 1993

This was the January selection for The Mules, my always amusing and superbly insightful reading group here in Delray Beach. We’ve been at it for at least a dozen years. Which means (given our penchant for occasionally reading two books a month) we have read and discussed close to 200 books, about half of them novels.

When we are united in liking an author, we will read two or three books by him/her. For example, we’ve read two of Yuval Harari’s books, several by Malcolm Gladwell, several by Michael Lewis, three of Hemingway’s novels, and several by Cormac McCarthy. Outer Dark was, I think, our third McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy has published 12 novels. The first, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. Outer Dark, I was surprised to learn, was his second novel, published in 1968. (The year I graduated high school!) As a second book, Outer Dark could have been a sophomore failure. And the early reviews were mixed. But today, some critics believe it to be one of his best.

I liked it very much. I read it once and was once again enchanted by the rawness and liveliness of McCarthy’s prose. Then I listened to it on tape and enjoyed it for its story.

Plot: It’s about Rinthy, a woman who bears her brother’s child and then sets out to find it (if it is still alive) after she discovers that her brother lied when he told her that it had died while she was sleeping.

Themes: The McCarthy standards – the ruthlessness of nature, the underrated human capacity for evil, the extreme difficulty of leading a moral life.

Interesting: The title came from the Gospel of Matthew. Specifically, the meeting between the Roman centurion and Jesus, when Jesus says: “But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The story is peppered with other Biblical themes. And as GG, one of our regular members, pointed out, there are also many allusions to Greek tragedies.

Critical Reception 

Though some early reviewers complained about McCarthy’s “increasingly dense style and sometimes arcane vocabulary,” most were good. A few examples:

* “Cormac McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark, combines the mythic and the actual in a perfectly executed work of the imagination. He has made the fabulous real, the ordinary mysterious.” (Thomas Lask, The New York Times)

* “There is no way to overstate the power, the absolute literary virtuosity, with which McCarthy draws his scenes.” (Walter Sullivan, Sewanee Review)

The first few paragraphs of the book…

SHE SHOOK HIM awake into the quiet darkness. Hush, she said. Quit hollerin.

He sat up. What? He said. What?

She shook him awake from dark to dark, delivered out of the clamorous rabble under a black sun and into a night more dolorous, sitting upright and cursing beneath his breath in the bed he shared with her and the nameless weight in her belly.

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I Keep Reading and Readers Keep Writing

More About Statins… 

I don’t think there’s anything I’ve written in recent years that has generated a bigger response from readers of this blog than my posts on statin drugs. A few friends who’ve been taking statins for years without symptoms have intimated that they think I’m loco. But the vast majority of responses I’ve received from readers that don’t know me have been supportive.

I’ve posted some of them already. But they keep coming in.

Some share their own stories:

“By now, you probably have more feedback than you need, but I wanted to share my personal experience.

“[Like you] I had the exhaustion side effects with statins. I also developed excruciating pain, first in one shoulder and eventually in both. If I lifted my arm or reached for something in the wrong way I was paralyzed (yes, paralyzed!) by pain that would drop me to my knees. Yes, I would fall down. [When I stopped taking statins,] it took two weeks for the pain to begin to subside! After 90 days, I was 100% pain free and my range of motion was completely normal.

“Before I went bare, my doctor had tried ALL the name brands & generics. He had recommended niacin as a natural replacement for statins, but the dosage required was so high I just went bare.” – TM

“Just want to drop you a note of thanks for your statin research materials. I too have had negative effects of various statins and have decided to no longer use them. Thanks for doing the thorough research for me.” – KW

Some want to share information they’ve gathered from their own research:

“In case you have not seen this in your research, here’s another video from Dr. Maryanne Demasi (‘Statin Wars: Have we been misled by the evidence?’).

Here’s a more recent article from Demasi (‘New analysis shows statins have minimal benefits’).

“And here’s an article showing that we actually need high cholesterol as we age. The idea that some arbitrary figure is the correct level for all seven billion of us is nonsense.” – KI

 

Some have suggestions for non-statin alternatives:

“It is true, statins will not extend your life according to the stats. The primary beneficiaries of the drugs have been the pharmaceutical companies. I’ve been following this issue for decades. Cholesterol numbers are a minefield. Arguably more important [than LDL and HDL] are your triglyceride numbers. If you want to have those numbers plummet, take… a large daily intake of pharmaceutical grade omega-3 twice a day to maintain blood serum levels. In addition to massively lowering triglyceride numbers, it helps with cholesterol, heart, eye health, brain function, hair and skin, and not in a small way…. If you find the need to continue with a statin, at least go the natural route and use red yeast rice.” – GM

“About 20 years ago, my physician recommended I start taking statins based on my lipid panel, which showed total cholesterol 40 points above the normal amount recommended. When I asked him how much longer I would live if I took them, he said he had no idea. I did some investigating and discovered the only positive results for longevity and cognitive ability were with the reduction of triglycerides, and taking omega-3 fish oil was proven to reduce them. I have been taking prescription icosapent ethyl ever since, and although my total cholesterol is still 10 points above range, my triglycerides are around 50, which is 100 points below the high range. – KK

“Try taking CoQ10 along with your statin. It’s been shown to mitigate the side effects of statins.” – BI

And some just want to offer moral support:

“I was really sorry to read about your struggles with statins. They have a very poor reputation in the UK for side effects as well.” – DG

Given the response, I’m continuing to research the pros and cons. Let me know if you discover something – a scientific study (but not meaningless “expert” statement) – that contradicts or confirms what I’ve been saying.

 

More About Ivermectin – and What We Got Wrong… 

One of the reasons I’ve been writing these reports on what “we” (the US government and the mainstream media) got wrong since the outbreak of COVID three years ago is that I could see that, from the beginning, so many of the “facts” about the virus and how it should be dealt with made no sense. And yet, because of the political nature of COVID, any rational discussion about it was impossible. Virtually everything – from the virus’s place of origin to its infectiousness to its lethality and to everything proposed to deal with it – became a symbol for one’s political perspective.

It was insane. It still is.

The last time I wrote about this topic, it was about ivermectin. How, after Trump mentioned it as a possible remedy, the CDC, the Biden administration, and the mainstream press went after it, arguing that the drug was useless and dangerous, and that anyone that said otherwise was a purveyor of fake news.

Flash-forward two-plus years. Everyone, except for a handful of people that have been isolated somewhere, knows that ivermectin has been proven to be both safe and effective. And not just against the pathogens it had used for in the past, but also against COVID.

The CDC website has been revised to reflect the present consensus. But they haven’t taken responsibility for the misinformation they’d published for nearly three years. Nor has the government taken responsibility for the assault it launched against doctors that used ivermectin to treat COVID. Now, some of those doctors are suing the government for the damage those attacks did to their practices and their reputations. Take a look here.

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Seven Links to Make Your Life a Little Richer

Throughout the year, I collect a treasure trove of little stories I want to share with you. For various reasons, it doesn’t always happen. But the trove continues to grow. So, before I forget about them, here are a half-dozen from 2022…

  1. From The Hustle: a fascinating article on the commercial history of the Ouija board. Read it here.
  2. 2. From Mental Floss: Can faking a smile make you happier? Find out what scientists have discovered here.
  3. From Forbes: 2022’s highest-paid dead celebrities. Get the details here.
  4. From World History Food: a video about American foods that are banned in other countries. Watch it here.
  5. From The Guardian: A “coup for poo” – Australia approves the world’s first fecal transplant. Why does it matter? Click here.
  6. From The Magazine Project: “What’s in a Face?” – an experiment in tracking cultural changes through images of faces in Time magazine from 1923-2014. Why they did it… how they did it… and what they found out here.
  7. From Tableau Public: 30 years of UFO sightings. See the data here.
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The amazing comedic skills of Jim Carrey were evident at the beginning of his career. Click here to watch his debut on national television: The Tonight Show, Nov. 24, 1983.

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