Half the world economy is one accident away from a deflation trap. The emerging market bloc makes up half the world economy, far higher than in any previous crisis. Roughly $4 trillion of foreign funds swept into emerging markets after the Lehman crisis, much of it by then "momentum money" late to the party.

One country after another is now having to tighten into weakness. Neil Shearing from Capital Economics says Brazil, India and Russia are all suffering from the 1970s curse of "stagflation," unable to stimulate their economies to revive growth.

Mr. Shearing said the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are in worse shape than many of the other emerging market states, but the strains are spreading.

While every story is different, the common theme for the BRICS is that they have exhausted their catch-up growth models, let credit booms get out of hand and failed to push through reforms while the going was good. Productivity rates have plummeted almost everywhere.  That most certainly includes China.

Due to time constraints, C-Span ended the broadcast of my speech last week, Why Liberals Are Incapable of Defending America , in the middle of my reply to a question about why most journalists are so liberal.

I was about to use the New York Times liberal columnist Maureen Dowd as an example when C-Span switched to another event. This is because in February 2000 during the presidential campaign, I wrote a letter to the New York Times commenting on a column of Miss Dowd which was such a perfect instance of why liberals, and liberal journalists like her, really don’t care about individual people.

So to complete the answer you couldn’t see on C-Span, here’s the letter:

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.