Hello everyone.

Greetings from Montecito, where it is balmy and nice. Cool temps and an ocean breeze. Dreading going back to Texas in a few weeks. Where it isn’t any of the above.

I’ve noticed the opens on the last couple of Arrows are down. That, combined with the fact that for the last few weeks I’ve gotten dozens of out-of-the-office bounce back emails, leads me to believe with Sherlockian acuity that it is vacation time for a lot of people. So this will be a good time for me to take a short one, too. Today’s Arrow is Arrow #187, which means I’ve been cranking this newsletter out every Thursday from all over the world without a break since the first Thursday in January 2021. Donald Trump was still president (for a few more weeks) when I wrote the first Arrow, which wasn’t called The Arrow then. It was called the No Name Newsletter.

I’ve got kids and grandkids coming in from all over the place. Just picked a group up from the airport yesterday. I want to spend as much time with them as I can. Plus, I’ve got to give a talk on August 17 in San Diego, so I’ve got to carve out some time to make slides, which is a loathsome task, for me, anyway.

This Arrow and the next will still come out, but will be a bit streamlined as compared to the more wordy missives you’re used to. Then once my little break for the fam and the slides is over, it will be back to normal. Thanks in advance for cutting me some slack.

Political Diversions

I’ve stayed away from politics in The Arrow for a while now. But a piece by Alex Berenson yesterday inspired me to step back into the water. As anyone who has read Berenson for any length of time knows, he is a full-on lefty. He used to write for the NY Times, so he had to have left wing credentials to even get hired.

But the Covid pandemic has more or less red pilled him.

When I first started reading him back around the time I started writing The Arrow, Berenson despised Trump to the max. I don’t think he had TDS, but he was close. Then as he (Berenson) got screwed over by Big Tech (he was banned from Twitter for writing something totally truthful) he began to change. Not so much on his opinion of Trump, but on his opinion of the left wing media, Big Tech, and the left wing itself.

He ended up suing Twitter over his banishment and won the first round of the fight, which was to not have his lawsuit dismissed. Which meant he could proceed to the discovery process. Which meant he could demand all the Twitter records having anything to do with his lawsuit and his contention he had been banned for tweeting something true. He was also after any communications from government employees having anything to do with his banning.

Twitter wanted no part of having to meet Berenson’s discovery demands, so they promptly settled the case. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter and opened the files. Now we all know from the Twitter Files that Uncle Sam and his many minions were up to their elbows in ‘suggesting’ Twitter ban Berenson and a bunch of other people over so called ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation,’ most of which has turned out to be spot on.

I’ve watched Berenson’s political stance evolve over the years I’ve been reading him to the point at which he has now publicly stated he is voting for Trump. He was brought to this state by all the prosecutions of Trump in NYC in what were clearly unfair trials overseen by totally biased judges. These were all episodes of lawfare at its worst, and they pushed Berenson over the edge.

I was surprised to read his piece yesterday in which he described J.D. Vance as being somehow off. This was the first of a two-part piece, but I can already tell where it is headed. And I believe his reasons are based on his upbringing in and around NYC. I don’t think he’s spent a lot of time in the South, and I think he’s misreading the Southern vibe. But I’ll need to see part 2 to know for sure.

What this long prologue is leading up to is his remark that he knew he was going to piss off his readers by writing the piece. The remark came in another article posted within a few hours of the first one. In this article—which was not part 2 of the first—he posted a comment from one of his readers. In his lead up to this comment, Berenson wrote:

This is exactly how I feel about my non-medical ramblings in The Arrow. I suspect many of you have me pegged as having particular political beliefs, but I can tell you that you’re probably wrong. I’ve heard it said by a number of people that if you ask someone his position on two issues, you can identify that person’s political party. And you can identify him/her as a tribalist and a nonthinker. I suspect most would be surprised at how I would answer those questions.

And I like to think my musings on these various non-medical issues are a feature, not a bug.

As most of you have probably discerned, I read voraciously. And during this much reading, I come across a lot of standard BS. But I also come across some gems. So before we get to the poll responses, I’d like to pass along a few of those gems most of you probably haven’t read.

A Palace Coup?

The first one I came across in Seymour Hersh’s Substack, to which I have a paid subscription. Hersh is an award-winning investigative reporter who has been on the beat for about 60 plus years now. He’s broken so many stories he, himself, has probably lost count. Just today he wrote a long article about Lt. William Calley and the Mai Li Massacre. Hersh broke that story, and his post today (unpaywalled) is a long recounting of what he went through to find Calley, who was carefully hidden, and get the goods on what happened. If you read it, you will see the depths a true investigative reporter goes to find the facts.

Since Hersh is way up in his 80s now, he has had many years to develop sources all over the place. Most are highly placed in the administrative state and in the intelligence community. When something happens, Hersh has a go-to person or 20 to find out the real story.

Here is what he wrote last week in an article titled Leaving Las Vegas (paywalled) about Biden’s decision to step down at the end of his term.

He describes how Biden was suddenly stricken with some sort of medical issue while campaigning in Nevada. He was rushed to the nearest emergency room, but on the way, the caravan was rerouted to Air Force One. People in the press corp aboard the plane told Hersh the pilot was instructed to get to Delaware at warp speed. Once there Biden was hustled off to Rehoboth Beach, from where it was reported he had Covid. (Since the events described below, I haven’t heard the Covid diagnosis since. But I may just have missed it. What did Biden really come down with that occasioned such a hurried trip back. Who knows?)

But this was enough for the party elders. And all the downline Democrat candidates who were worried about getting swept away in a Trump landslide. And they sprang into action.

According the Hersh’s sources, here’s what happened.

A palace coup? Make of it what you will.

Cognitive Dissonance

I’ve written about cognitive dissonance a few times in these pages. An enormously fascinating topic to me, cognitive dissonance occurs when an individual is presented with two competing ‘facts’ about a person, situation, political idea, etc. It is manifest as an uneasiness, because it is unpleasant to be confronted with what appears to be a truthful attack on something or someone in which you believe deeply.

You can resolve it in a couple of ways. First, you can accept the truth you just learned and change your mind. Then no more angst. Your new beliefs are in compliance with your newly learned truth. Or, second, you can figure out a way to disregard your newly learned truth, so your original belief is still intact. No more angst because there’s no longer any cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance arises often in politics, primarily because politicians (like all of us) are not perfect. They screw up often. And when they do, those who are fans of either the politician, the politician’s party, or both devolve into cognitive dissonance.

Here is where the party leaders, all of whom understand cognitive dissonance, step in. They figure out a way to resolve the cognitive dissonance, call their media lackeys and explain what they need to have done. The media then springs into action with the talking points given them and provides a reason or an excuse for the screw up. That’s why you see all those video compilations of all the talking heads using the exact same words or phrases. (Here’s a recent example—I wonder if Alex Berenson watched this one.)They were planted. And, bingo!, the public’s cognitive dissonance is resolved.

One of the Substacks I pay to read is written by Dale Saran, who is a friend of mine. Dale, an avid reader of The Arrow (my words; not his), has had an interesting career to say the least. He was a Marine helicopter pilot for years, then went to law school while still in the Marines. He then began to represent members of the armed forces against the US Government. He was the lawyer for a group of military people who refused to take the anthrax experimental vaccine back in the day. He wrote a book about the entire affair, which gets into many legal and vaccine development complexities. He is now suing the US on behalf of many members of the armed forces who were fired for refusing to take the COVID vaccine.

If you have any interest in aviation, military aviation, Naval aviator training, flying helicopters, military air mishaps, or anything associated, I urge you to read Dale’s Substack.

When I was in college, the Viet Nam war was in full force. I was contemplating signing up for a program called NavCad, which was structured for those wanting to be naval aviators (which were much in demand at the time) to shortcut the process. In order to go to flight school, you first had to go through officer candidate school (OCS) and become an officer. Typically, one couldn’t get into OCS without a college degree. The NavCad program was set up so that those who entered it would go to OCS during the last two summers before graduating from college. Upon graduation (assuming you had completed OCS), you would get your commission and proceed directly to the naval flight school in Pensacola.

I qualified for NavCad, but my father talked me out of it. He said “There are all kinds of things that can go wrong with an airplane under normal circumstances. There are even more things that can go wrong when people are shooting bullets at them.” He encouraged me to wait till I graduated, then decide. He said the only price I would pay for waiting was that I would have to do OCS after graduation then go to flight school. It was strange, because though I almost never took his advice on anything, I did take it on this.

Reading Dale’s accounts of his aviator training gave me an idea of what I would have been in for.

Also, his discussions of all that can go wrong (and often does) with helicopters confirmed my own feelings about them. I flew in helicopters a number of times while I was working for the US Forest Service during my summers in college (when I would have otherwise been in naval OCS). We on the fire crew would be flown up into the mountains around Bridgeport, California (located on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas) to put out fires caused by lightening strikes (or campers). Then once on a trip to Alaska, MD, my father, and I flew in a helicopter up to one of the glaciers. All these flights sort of creeped me out. After reading of Dale’s experience, I realized I was justified in that feeling.

Like me, Dale occasionally writes about politics. Unlike me, he’s pretty clear on which side he comes down on. A couple of days ago he wrote about cognitive dissonance (which inspired me to write about it today). He included a great graphic that nicely summarizes cognitive dissonance.

If you learn a truth that throws you into cognitive dissonance, you can change your action or change your belief to escape.

The premise of Dale’s post is that there is no cognitive dissonance in politics. People are totally tribal and nothing, no matter how bad, will dissuade them from their politics. Especially in this particular time in which we live.

He makes the point that irrespective of how bad any Democrat candidate might be, the cognitive dissonance resolver is “…but TRUMP!!1!!”

Which is true.

I’m not going to go into all of them, but you’ve probably heard all the objections people make to Kamala Harris. Each one could be and is answered in the minds of many by …but TRUMP!!1!!

Which I find strange, because in our lifetime there has never been a former president running for office again. This is a first for all of us. So we don’t have to guess how Trump might govern; we lived through four years of it. We’ve had vastly more than a sneak preview. We’ve sat through a four-year movie.

Trump basically governed like a moderate Republican. He lowered taxes and got rid of a bunch of regulations. And he started no wars. Consequently, the stock market rocketed upward and the economy boomed. Then came Covid, and we know the rest.

Trump was combative with the press. But the press hated him before he became combative. The intelligence community spun up this big Russian collusion hoax to try to get him removed from office, which would have unnerved anyone elected as president. Trump wrote mean tweets, and he called people names. Which, in my view, is not particularly presidential, but these are different times, so who knows what’s normal?

I suspect he’ll govern about the same if he gets re-elected. I suspect he would appoint better people to his administration than he did last time, but other than that, I imagine it will be about the same.

That’s not the way all the …but TRUMP!!1!! people see it. And that’s why Dale wrote that there is no cognitive dissonance where Trump or politics is concerned, because it’s all tribal. You don’t sell members of your Tribe down the river under any circumstances.

But that’s not always true.

It is possible for a politician—even a popular one—to indulge in behavior so egregious that even his own tribe can’t overlook it.

As evidence I present to you John Edwards. Former US Senator from South Carolina. Former Vice-Presidential candidate (he ran as VP with John Kerry) and 2004 and 2008 Presidential candidate.

When it was revealed during Edwards’s 2008 presidential campaign that while his wife, who was dying of breast cancer, was out campaigning her heart out for him, he was carrying on an affair with a mistress and fathered a child by her.

That was a bridge too far for even his most devoted followers. So there is indeed a limit that can be reached where cognitive dissonance really does occur. But I agree with Dale, that in politics it’s a high (low?) bar.

There are many things that expose character. I leave you with this short video of John Edwards that tells a lot. I posted this on my blog years and years ago. I was surprised to find it is still findable.

Poll Responses

Slow Burn Training

There were not really a lot of medical questions this time around. There were a few about the X3 Band system. One in particular telling me the respondent had a back problem and asking if the system could possible worsen the issue.

The question prompted me to change my own routine for the better. One of the real advantages to slow motion or slow burn training is that it minimizes the potential for injury. And really minimizes recovery time.

When people try to lift heavy weights, they usually do so in sort of jerky motions. They have to overcome inertia to get the weight moving past the difficult part. As I discussed, the muscles are weaker at the start of a lift and get stronger as they contract. So to get past this weaker part, many people recruit momentum by throwing the weight to get it going. In doing so, they often put major stress on tendons and ligaments. Which is why after a weight workout the soreness experienced the next day is mainly in these structures.

When I first worked out with Fred Hahn, I almost couldn’t walk after the workout. Same with MD. We were both so exhausted, we could barely walk back to our hotel in NY. We both dreaded waking up the next morning, fearing that we would be so sore we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. As it turned out, we weren’t particularly sore at all. We felt like we had had a workout, but we had no joint or ligament pain. In thinking through it, I concluded that due to the slow motion speed of the exercise, we used a lot less weight to get to failure than we would if we were lifting weights the standard way of doing multiple sets. And since it just took a few slow motion reps to get to failure, all we were really working were the muscles involved. And we weren’t putting a lot of stress on tendons and ligaments.

Muscle is extremely vascular whereas tendons and ligaments are extremely non-vascular. If the muscle gets stressed, there is plenty of blood to bring it nourishment and provide macrophages and other white blood cells to clear up the damage. Not so in the tendons and ligaments. Consequently, these structures stay inflamed. And painful.

I’ve mentioned a number of times how much I hate training with the X3 system, but I do it because it’s good for me. After thinking about it based on this respondent’s question, I decided to back down on the band size I was using, and do the exercises in slow motion. Entirely different experience. I still went to failure, but it wasn’t nearly as miserable.

I had let my ego get in the way of my progress. I wanted to move up the band scale as quickly as possible, so I was not performing the exercises in a controlled fashion. I was leaning and twisting to recruit other muscles to help instead of slowing working the muscles I needed to work using perfect form.

So, a word to the wise…

Learn from my idiocy.

Use perfect form. Do the exercises exactly as shown. Don’t try to move up in bands just to move up in bands. Do it to build strength, not to be able to say, Whoa, I’m already up to the Big Boy bands.

I’m just glad I wasn’t injured doing it the way I was.

Jeffrey Sach’s Interview

I got a bunch of comments, poll responses, and even a few emails on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Jeffrey Sachs. I was expecting a number of …but Tucker Carlson!!!! type response, but I got none of those. Everyone agreed with Sachs, except for one.

I have written many times in these pages that I think Putin is a swine. I’ve quoted liberally from a great book titled Welcome to Putingrad written by the only person ever to beat Putin in court and take some of his assets. (The book was written by a client of my accountant’s. And my accountant was involved in the lawsuit, made many trips to Russia, and has confirmed to me much of what is in the book.) I agree that Putin bombed a building in Russia, which claimed the lives of many Russian citizens just to provide a motive for going after the Chechnyans. No one has to persuade me that Putin is a bad guy. But, as I’ve said about Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and the rest, bad guys can be done bad. And when they are done bad, they react appropriately.

I’m firmly convinced that had Ukraine promised they wouldn’t have joined NATO, there would have been no war. And hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians would still be alive. And God only knows how many billions of dollars of infrastructure would still be standing.

I do agree that Israel has the right to respond to Oct 7. One point I did disagree with Sachs on is that I don’t think there can ever be—not in my lifetime at least—a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian situation. No matter how much diplomacy is involved.

Like Sachs, I don’t think it is in the US’s interest to involve ourselves in every dispute out there. I believe we should concern ourselves with our own economy and infrastructure (which is going to shit), and let other countries work out their own differences.

There was a time when the USSR existed that we needed to ensure other countries didn’t fall into the Soviet orbit. But those days are gone. The West has won. Now we just need to step back and let other countries solve their own problems.

I’ve traveled enough in Europe and know enough Europeans to know that the way Sachs describes how Europeans think of the US is exactly how they think of the US.

And I believe our biggest issue is how to keep the neocons in check. Lately, most of the neocons have been in the Republican party, whereas in earlier times, they were all Democrats. When Trump was elected, many of them moved back to the Democrats. Think Cheney, Kristol, Goldberg, et al.

Anyway, that’s my response to this criticism.

Okay, on to the medical stuff…

Colon Cancer Detection Test

A few days ago I came across an article about a new way to detect colon cancer with a blood test called Shield that has been approved by the FDA. Since colon cancer is the second leading cause of death from cancer, and since colon cancer is one of those cancers that, if detected early, can be successfully treated, it would be nice to be able to get a blood test and identify it early.

The test is available now and costs $895. But with the new FDA approval, many insurance companies will doubtless begin covering it. But does the test do what we hope it will do? Let’s take a look.

According to the article

Hmmm. Already we see a problem. The test is 83% effective in finding colorectal cancers, but only 13% effective of finding them early on, when treatment has a much, much better prognosis.

So getting a positive read on the test basically signs you up for a colonoscopy. And au contraire to what most people believe, colonoscopies are not entirely benign procedures. It doesn’t happen often, but perforations of the colon do happen with colonoscopies. And a colonic perforation is a dreadful event, which can ultimately prove fatal. Many require long hospitalizations and are rife with problems for years.

Here is a blog post of a person who had a colon perforation. It’s not for the squeamish. I think this guy is no longer with us. He and I used to communicate fairly regularly, but then, all of a sudden, he went silent. I haven’t heard from him since 2014, so I fear the worst. His is an extreme example, but it does show what can happen and why colonoscopies should not be taken lightly.

I looked up the paper describing the study showing the 83% effective rate of this blood test. I was hoping to find the number of false positives and negatives, so I could do a Bayesian analysis just to see how effective this test really is.

Here’s what I found.

What all this means, as you can see from the bolded sections above, is that 83.1% of all the subjects who actually had a previous diagnosis of colon cancer came up positive on the Shield blood test. 16.9% of people who had colon cancer came up negative. That means those people got a false negative test, i.e., their tests came up negative, yet they had colon cancer.

On the other side of the equation, 89.6% of those subjects who did not have colon cancer showed up as negative for colon cancer on the test, while 10.4% of people who did not have colon cancer came up positive. Thus 10.4% got a false positive test.

We now know the false positive and false negative rates of the test, so we can do a Bayesian analysis.

Before we do, let me expound a bit on Bayesian analyses.

Bayesian analyses is perfect for these kinds of situations and it is in line with the way we normally think. A Bayesian analysis takes into consideration what we already know as fact and then uses the new information we’re trying to make sense of in light of what we already know.

Let’s look at a really simple minded, but accurate way a Bayesian analysis could be used.

We all know that a random flip of a coin (assuming it’s not some kind of trick coin) will come up heads and tails an equal number of times over a large number of coin flips. So the odds are 50-50 it will come up heads or tails. We all know that.

Now let’s say we decide to do an experiment, and we flip a coin 50 times. The coin comes up heads 33 times and tails 17 times. We are amazed, so we decide to publish an article about this. And we use the p-value to determine the statistical significance of this momentous event, and it comes up p = 0.005, which is highly statistically significant (I haven’t actually made this calculation—this is just for discussion purposes.), so we are off to the races. We publish, and due to our low p-value, we get published.

Now you know this is bogus, because you know over time a fair coin is going to come up heads half the time and tails the other half. But the above is how many, many scientific papers are published. They just look at the p-value.

A Bayesian analysis considers what is called a prior. Which is the mass of evidence we already have.

Let’s say some schmuck had some time on his hands and decided to flip a coin a million times and wrote down every result. At the end of his work, he found heads had come up 500, 212 times and tails came up 499,788 times. That would be his prior.

When the 33 heads to 17 tails in our experiment above is calculated in with that prior, it doesn’t really change the prior to any meaningful extent. Which means the paper published with the p-value of 0.005 is total bullshit, which, sad to say, is the same state as so many ‘scientific’ papers.

Okay, let’s look at what we know:

• True positive rate, i.e., the sensitivity of the test: 83.1 percent

• False negative rate: 16.9 percent

• True negative rate (specificity): 89.6 percent

• False positive rate: 10.4 percent

The only thing we don’t know is the prior, which is the incidence of colon cancer in the population. Turns out that is 35.7 people out of 100,000 come down with colon cancer annually. There are more people than that with known colon cancer, but they aren’t likely to take a colon cancer test. We’re looking for people who don’t know whether or not they have colon cancer, so they would be candidates for the test. And the incidence of colon cancer is as close as we can come to how many people have colon cancer, but don’t know it, and so would be candidates for this test.

So we can add to our list above the incidence of colon cancer, which is 35.7/100,000 or 0.0357 percent.

Let’s lay this all out in probabilities as per Bayes, so we can fill in the equation.

• P(C) = 0.000357 (the probability of having colon cancer)

• P(-C) = 1-0.000357 = 0.999643 (the probability of not having colon cancer)

• P(+T|C) = 0.831 (the probability of a positive test given that the person has colon cancer)

• P(+T|-C) = 0.104 (the probability of a positive test given the person doesn’t have cancer)

Now we’re ready to Bayesiate (my made up word). Here is how you do a Bayesian analysis in equation form.

P(C|+T) is the first term, which means in Bayesian parlance the probability of actually having cancer (C) given a positive (+T) result from the Shield test. This is what you want to know. Your doctor has just called and told you your blood test is positive for colon cancer and that you need to come in for a colonoscopy ASAP. Your first thought—had your doctor told you the test was 83.1 percent reliable—is that odds are you have colon cancer. Let’s see what the odds really are.

Oh, to help you understand the terminology, the P(C|+T) means the probability P of having colon cancer C given a positive test +T equals whatever we end up calculating. The vertical line in probability speak means “given that.”

P(C|+T) = [P(+T|C) X P(C)] / [P(+T|C) X P(C) + P(+T|-C) X P(-C)]

Keeping track of what all these terms mean and filling in the numbers, you end up with

P(C|+T) = (0.831 X 0.000357) / [(0.831 X 0.000357) + (0.104 X 0.999643)]

Which, if you do the math, calculates out to 0.002845.

Converting to a percentage gives you 0.2845 percent.

Which means if you get a positive test using this testing system, the odds are less than one percent that you actually have colon cancer. Which is equivalent to about 1 in 351 people who test positive actually having the disease.

Would you pay $895 for such a test?

All it would give you is massive angst. And the possibility of a colonic perforation, which would be greater than the risk of actually having colon cancer given a positive test result.

The most recent paper I could find on the rate of colon perforation looked at over a half million colonoscopies in 2011 and found a perforation rate of 0.6 percent.

Based on the Bayesian calculation above, 1 out of 351 people will actually have cancer given a positive test. Which means 350 people will not have cancer. If all of those 350 people get a colonoscopy, two of them (2.1 to be exact) will end up with a perforation of their colon.

The reason I’ve gone on at length about all this is that tests like this seem benign, but they really aren’t. In my view, they’re almost worthless. If you come back with a positive result, you’ll be angst ridden and will spend the time and money to get a colonoscopy, risking perforation, and the actual odds of your having the disease are minuscule. If I bellied up to the bar and took this test myself, I would probably go in for anoscopy. That’s a procedure that is pretty much what it sounds like. The doc will stick a short tube up your anus and look around. Virtually no risk of a perforation, and it will likely find a cancer if one is there. As I recall from med school, 75 percent of colorectal cancers are in reach of a finger. Or so that’s what they told us to ensure we did digital rectal exams on all our patients.

So, now you’ve got all the data to make an intelligent decision about whether or not you would want to take such a test and to determine what action you might want to take if you did take the test and it ended up positive. Sadly, probably not one doctor in 500 would know how to make this calculation. Most would say, The test is 83.1 percent sensitive. So if you’re positive, odds are you’ve got colon cancer. And the doc would be so so wrong. And he/she will never pay for it. Here’s why.

The problem with this kind of issue was summed up nicely by the head of the surgery department when I was in my surgical residency. Typically, when a patient has a spot on their lung seen on X-ray, an entire progression of tests follow. First, we tested for sputum cytology. If there were cancerous cells found in the sputum, that pretty much confirmed the diagnosis of lung cancer. The patient then went to surgery for removal of the tumor. If the sputum cytology was negative, the next thing was a bronchial wash, which is as unpleasant as it sounds. If there is a tumor, it’s off to surgery. If not, further testing is necessary.

The next step is a needle biopsy of the tumor. If it comes up malignant, off to surgery. If benign, then the patient is spared. If, after all this, a definitive diagnosis can’t be made, it’s off to the OR to take the mass out and send it to the pathologist for confirmation one way or another.

When we had cases like this, we would always stand around the anesthetized patient awaiting word from the pathologist. If it was positive for cancer, we did a wide resection. If negative, we removed the lump and that was the end of it.

Our chief of surgery was a good guy, but he no longer operated a lot. He had a patient in his clinic who had a mass on her chest X-ray. Our chief said schedule her for surgery. He didn’t order any of the tests I described above to rule in or out a malignancy. I was assisting him in the surgery, and when we got to the mass, we pretty much knew it was benign, but we sent it off to pathology. We were all standing there around the patient masked and gowned, and I was wondering why we didn’t go through all the protocols before we operated.

Having taken care of a lot of lung surgery patients post op, I knew how painful the recovery was for those who had undergone chest surgery. Upon awakening the patient has to breathe, and it hurts like hell. So, while we were standing there awaiting the path report, which they broadcast in over the intercom, I asked the head of the department why he skipped all the testing and went straight to surgery. I said, if this path report comes back benign and we’ve opened this lady’s chest unnecessarily, won’t she be pissed.

His answer: “Son, no one ever gets pissed when you tell them they don’t have cancer.”

So the patients who are misinformed by being told they have an 83.1 percent chance of having cancer will never be pissed when they get a clean colonoscopy. Because they will never know the true odds.

Let me digress here for a bit. If I were to contemplate a colonoscopy, I would get a virtual one, which is approved by the FDA. No risk of perforation. And, really, a better, more thorough exam. The doc who does the standard colonoscopy can see only the inside of the colon. With a virtual colonoscopy both the inside of the colon can be seen along with the area outside the colon wall. The only problem with a virtual colonoscopy is that if a polyp or other lesion is found, the patient has to undergo a regular colonoscopy to biopsy it. I would still opt for the virtual.

A caveat: I am not an expert in Bayesian analysis. If anyone out there is, feel free to double check me on my equation. I feel pretty confident it’s correct. I feel 100 percent confident the math is correct. But if anyone does find an error, please notify me, and I’ll make the correction next week. If I did make an error, I would bet my boots that the correct answer would still be way, way, way lower than the 83.1 percent.

This always happens to me. My fam just checked to see how I was doing, so we could all head out for fun. I checked my word count, and it’s already over 7,000 words (7,099 to be exact—and that was before I wrote this paragraph).

I planned to write a bit more on the Randle cycle based on another video a reader sent me by Mercola. There is so much nonsense that needs correcting and so little time. Unless something more pressing and more in need of correction comes up, I’ll address the control of sugar and fat burning next week.

Since I didn’t get to everything, no paywall this week, so it’s free to all. Enjoy!

Odds and Ends

• Have you tried American wagyu beef? If not, you should give it a try.

• Many studies have shown placebos work to relieve pain. But how do they do so? New mouse study provides some clues.

• College is way too expensive these days. Why? More administrators. For example, MIT grew staff size by 1,200 while enrollment barely budged. It’s the same almost everywhere. Gotta keep those highly educated elites employed.

• Janet Yellen says $3 trillion needed annually for climate financing, far more than current level. I say we need a new Secretary of the Treasury. The one we’ve got is obviously brain dead.

• An angry whale trashes a boat in off Portsmouth, NH. Kid in boat in foreground makes the good decision to unass the area ASAP.

• You read all these recipes, then you realize why all these people are dead.

• Sad story of the demise of the Boy Scouts, of which I was a proud member in my youth. Two of my grandsons are Eagle Scouts. When will all this end?

• Stunning new transistor’s superlative properties could have broad electronics applications. Can switch at least 100 billion times with no signs of degradation.

• Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten ice cream recipe. Pretty elaborate process. Apparently once Jefferson tasted ice cream in France, he was hooked. I can identify.

• Have you ever peed in a swimming pool? If so, don’t worry about it. All the Olympic athletes do it.

• COVID surging in highly-vaccinated California, nears two-year summer high. 'Almost everybody has it.’ But, wait, what about the safe and effective vaccines the state authorities badgered everyone into getting? Apparently, they ain’t too effective.

• Scientists reconstructed a 52,000-Year-Old woolly mammoth’s DNA. Resurrection may be next.

• Politics do matter. Britain ceases to be top 10 manufacturer for the first time since the industrial revolution.

• A new study reports Estonia’s climate was 2-3°C warmer and sea levels were 10-20 m higher ~7,300 years ago.

• New tyrannosaur species found in China fills gap in evolutionary record as these reptiles grew smaller.

• This is one of those psychological studies that are so dumb no one will ever replicate it. Most people pick their baby’s names before they’re born.

• Divers find 19th century Baltic Sea shipwreck with 'more than 100 bottles of Champagne' and many bottles of mineral water.

• Video shows tens of thousands of dragon flies swarming beachgoers at the Rhode Island seaside. Pretty incredible.

• How America’s obsession with DEI is sabotaging our medical schools. Pity the poor patients who have to be treated by these DEI-trained doctors.

• Did Egyptian engineers use hydraulics to help build one of the massive pyramids 4,500 years ago?

Newsletter Recommendations

As always, I’ve to to recommend MD’s OutlanderMD Substack. This week she goes over the trauma of a hammer-smashed hand, which is maybe slightly less grisly than her treatment of hanging the week before.

Books & Biceps is just what it says. It’s about strength training and books, an unlikely combination. I enjoy it, so you may, too. Give it a look.

And one of my favorites, Morning Brew. Get all the news first thing in the morning in bite-sized portions. I read it first thing every day. Best of all, it’s free.

Video of the Week

In honor of the Olympics. Not everyone has to go to Paris to compete. At least not to be on video. This guy from Alabama can do it right from the farm. I was waiting for the dismount, and he didn’t disappoint

If the above doesn’t work, you can watch it here on Facebook.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Sorry about the sort of “abbreviated” version. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday with a real abbreviated version. I hope.

Please help me out by clicking the Like button, assuming, of course, that you like it.

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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