The tragic death of an Indian minister's wife and the overdose of a French president's "wife" give a startling insight into the misery that infidelity causes in a monogamous society.

In cultures like India and France, it is just not possible now for men to reap the sexual rewards that usually attend arrival at the top of society. President Zuma of South Africa has four wives and 20 children, while one Nigerian preacher is said to have 86 wives. Chinese emperors used to complain of their relentless sexual duties. Why the difference?

Human monogamy is an enduring puzzle. Among mammals we are the exception: just 3 per cent of mammals form pair bonds. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas, are promiscuous, very promiscuous, territorial-polygamous and harem-polygamous respectively.

Yet we are clearly monogamous by instinct as well as by tradition. Even in societies that allow polygamy, most people are in one-partner couples. Free-love communes always, without exception, collapse because people will insist on falling in love with particular individuals. This pairing tendency would baffle a bonobo, where sexual jealousy is apparently unknown.

So at some point in the distant past, we developed the habit of monogamous pair bonding. In human beings, monogamy probably goes back hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.  (See Jack Wheeler's Marriage and the Missing Link, September 2009.)

This is a companion piece to A Younger Brain from last March. That discussed how a nutrient called SAM-e (S-adenosyl-methionine) can actually youthen your brain. Now we’re going to talk about it can youthen your body.

The older you get, the more creaks and aches and tightness and soreness you get, particularly in connective tissue like cartilage. Our bodies aren’t designed to last as long as we live today, and these tissues wear out. Unlike rheumatoid arthritis, which is an auto-immune disease, osteoarthritis is a mechanical wearing away of joints, cartilage, and connective tissue.

I started taking the SAM-e regimen described in A Younger Brain for mental benefits. For some time, however, I was increasingly afflicted with sciatica and a variety of aching ailments. After about a month or so on the regimen, I noticed that the sciatica and ailments were gone. Gone as in completely vanished, gone as in I felt many years younger.

So, in Part I on January 8,  I left on the note about how many of you had thought the RSA had been bribed to handover backdoor information of their supposed unbreakable code.

Not as cute the government finally thinking "Hey, we forked over all this money for this equipment.  We actually own it or parts of it and now we demand access to our stuff."

Then they thought:   "Our partners under the 1994 CALEA law - the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act - requires communications companies to help us and provide a means and method to surveil so as not impede our investigations!  Let's have a talk with them.  Only this time we bring some of our other partners like DEA and DOJ into the conversation and let's get serious on this."

So the list of agencies who can surveil you just got bigger.  But how did they start surveiling?  Let's discuss begin with just one program called Carnivore.

It is estimated that up to a quarter of all American households still owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Many of these people have been able to refinance their home loans with much lower interest rates, but that does not solve the problem because they have a balance sheet problem rather than a cash-flow problem.

Those who owe more on their homes than they can sell them for, and who have little other savings or assets, are "locked in" to their existing homes.

Even if they have a better job offer in a location too distant to commute, they may not be able to take the job because they cannot afford the mortgage payments on their existing homes, cannot sell for a price higher than their mortgage, or cannot afford rent or house payments in the new location.

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are largely responsible for the problem.  Ironically, they too are locked in to an inescapble conundrum of their own making.