The Arrow #157

Hello friends.

Greetings from Dallas.

Wishing everyone a belated Happy New Year. I hope yours is full of health and prosperity.

On the morning of New Year’s Eve, I awakened at about 4:30. I was wide awake and my brain was humming. I rolled over and cuddled the bride in an effort to get back to sleep for a few hours. Then, as I always do in such situations, I think of what Marcus Aurelius wrote at the beginning of Book 5 in his Meditations:

As soon as these thoughts worm their way into my brain, I’m a goner. I’m left with no choice but to get up. Makes me wish I had never read his Meditations. Especially since this is the only one that has stuck with me like glue.

So, I dragged out of bed, made myself an Americano, and set to work. And, as it ended up, I was rewarded for my early rising. As it started to get light, a sort of red glow came through the sheer curtains in my study. I got up and looked out and was rewarded with one of the most unbelievable sunrises I’ve ever seen.

It was so gorgeous that I went and rousted MD from the bed, so she could see it. She was as astonished as I was and not even pissed that I had awakened her from a deep sleep. As usual, photos never do these things justice, but here is one I took from out the back door. Imagine what you see in this photo on steroids, and you’ll have some idea of how spectacular it was.

A funny thing happened when I went to post the photo above. I wanted to see if the photo had been transferred to my photos in the cloud, or if I needed to transfer it from my phone to my laptop. So, I went into my photo app on my Macbook Pro and looked for recent imports. Alas, the photos of the sunrise were not there, but another graphic was. I have no idea where this came from. I have no recollection of ever having seen it, and I’ve got a steel trap memory for things like this, especially over the short term, and my Photos app said it was imported on Dec 25, 23. I can’t imagine how it got into my photos without my putting it there. But there it was. And I laughed about it for at least 15 minutes. Maybe you’ll find it as funny as I did (do). If you have any idea where it appeared, please let me know, so I can give credit.

Okay, on to more serious things.

New Platform for The Arrow

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be migrating from Substack to a new platform. Substack has been okay for me, but it has a lot of limitations. One of my favorite reads for years now has been Morning Brew, a free daily newsletter that has all kinds of bells and whistles I love. It has none of the limitations Substack has.

When I first contemplated starting what ended up being The Arrow, I wanted to make it like the Morning Brew. Not necessarily to look like the Morning Brew, but to have the functionality of the Morning Brew. I checked with a few web developers to see if there were programs that would give the functionality of the Morning Brew. They told me the Morning Brew developed their own proprietary programs to do that which I hoped to do on my newsletter. There were no off-the-shelf programs I could purchase to do it.

So, I went ahead and used ConvertKit for The Arrow. Then, after a couple of years, I switched to Substack. I did so because growth was slow on the ConvertKit platform. Others who were using Substack told me their subscriber list grew when they switched platforms. Plus, ConvertKit didn’t have a way—at least any way I could figure out—to host all the previous issues of The Arrow. I was inundated with emails asking me for earlier issues. I could get them myself on ConvertKit and send links, but couldn’t have them automatically available. So, I spent a lot of time sending links.

Another annoyance with ConvertKit was that once I sent the email, I couldn’t go back and correct typos. Of which there are usually plenty, despite the bride’s combing through it before I send it. Many more of which my readers find. And I find. After the thing is already sent. But I can fix them on the Substack site. And anyone wanting to go back months ago has but to go to the Substack link and look at any of the weekly editions going back to Feb 2023, when I switched over.

About six months ago, I discovered that the developers who did all the work on the Morning Brew had started their own newsletter platform. And that their platform had all the bells and whistles that the Morning Brew has. Much though I wanted the bells and whistles I had lusted over for five years, I decided not to jump into it, because I didn’t know how much staying power this new group had. Would they run out of funds and leave me stranded? So, I figured I would wait and watch for a while to see how things went.

Now that platform has gotten many big-name users and has developed many more features than the Morning Brew had, so I’m ready to switch. One of the aggravations I have with Substack is that due to the founders’ cat fight with Elon Musk, Substack writers can no longer embed tweets. Since Musk took over Twitter (now X), he won’t allow Substack users to embed tweets (or Xs?) without Substack paying substantial fees for connecting to the X API. The new platform has paid the fee, I guess, because it allows embedding of tweets.

You may think this is a minor issue, but it really isn’t for me. Back before Musk bought Twitter, Twitter was like YouTube. It censored the heck out of everything. If you couldn’t get it on YouTube, you wouldn’t be able to get it on Twitter. Now that Musk has gotten rid of the censorship, tons of valuable videos are making their way there instead of on YouTube. But I can’t embed them.

Consequently, when you see a video on my Substack, here’s what I had to go through to get it there. I had to use an app, which I had to pay for, to rip it from Twitter. Then I have to upload it to Substack. Then you can play it. But, depending upon the size of the video, it can take 10-15 minutes for me to download it. Then another five minutes to upload it onto Substack. Which doesn’t seem like a lot of time in the grand scheme of things, but compared to what it used to be, which was drag the Twitter link, paste it to the page, and, Bingo, there was the video.

The whole Twitter (X) deal is just one of the annoyances with Substack in terms of what can be done.

So, I’ve decided to switch to the new platform. The Arrow will continue to look much like it has forever. In other words, it won’t look like the Morning Brew, it will just have the extra features the Morning Brew has plus a few.

The problem I have to deal with is that I have a mixture of paid and free subscribers, and these two lists have to be migrated separately. The folks at the new platform assure me the migration will be flawless as it has been with the many other writers they’ve migrated over. But I’m always antsy about these kinds of things.

You have my assurance that if there are any screw ups, I’ll make good on them. If next week, or the week after, you don’t get your Arrow, let me know, and I’ll make sure you do.

Here’s to hoping it all goes as smoothly as I’ve been promised it will.

Covid and Covid Vaccine Fatigue

I don’t know if the rest of you have developed as much Covid and Covid vaccine fatigue as I have, but I am sick to death of it. Every time I write something about it, I tell myself it’s the last time. I’m moving on from Covid.

Then I come across something so outrageous that I just have to write about it.

That’s what happened this week. Several times, in fact.

AMA and AAP Amicus Brief

One of my favorite Substacks is David Zweig’s newsletter Silent Lunch. David is an investigative reporter by trade, and I always find his material enlightening. A day or two ago he reported on how the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Biden administration in the freedom of speech case before the Supreme Court brought by the states of Missouri and Louisiana and a handful of individuals, including Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya.

An amicus brief, also called a friend of the court brief, is one filed by an individual or group who are not parties to the lawsuit in question, but who have a strong interest in the matter.

In this case, the lawsuit was filed over an abridgment of freedom of speech of the individuals and the citizens of the states involved committed by the US government. The Twitter files released by Elon Musk along with other documentation from Facebook and Google showed that those entities banned information on Covid and the Covid vaccines because it was purportedly misinformation. There is nothing in the US Constitution that prohibits private entities from banning whatever they want to ban for any reason. But in this case, there is substantial evidence that the US government, which is constitutionally prohibited from banning any speech, leaned heavily on these private companies to do the banning the government itself couldn’t legally do.

The sad part of the whole banning fiasco is that it turned out that most of what was banned as dis- or misinformation turned out to be true. The vaccines did not prevent transmission. The vaccines were not 95 percent effective in preventing Covid. Masks did not work to prevent transmission. The vaccines did not prevent deaths from Covid (the Pfizer data itself showed that more people died in the vaccine group than in the placebo group, and that’s the only RCT data we have). The vaccines were not harmless. And on and on.

The vast majority of the banning at the US government’s request dealt with the vaccines in one way or another. And virtually all of it ended up banning statements that turned out to be true. Not dis- or misinformation, but the truth.

As I wrote, there was a little governmental-induced banning over masks or over the use of ivermectin of hydroxychloroquine, but the vast majority of the banning was over the vaccines. And virtually all of the banned opinions turned out to be factual.

Now comes the AMA and the AAP amicus brief that argues that “the government has a “compelling interest” in combatting “vaccine misinformation.””

Zweig goes on to present a copy of the pertinent section of the brief.

Based on past history, you well know how accurate the government was in deciding what was vaccine misinformation and what wasn’t. As I mentioned above, our leaders completely missed the boat in what they considered misinformation.

The statement in the segment of the brief above saying that it is an indisputable scientific fact that vaccination saves lives is false. At least as it concerns the Covid-19 vaccines. The only RCT data we have is the Pfizer study of ~40,000 subjects. In that study, more subjects died in the vaccine arm than in the placebo arm. And that is the only non-anecdotal data we have. So how can the AMA and AAP say with a straight face that it is “an indisputable scientific fact that vaccination saves lives” when referring to the Covid vaccines. The only real science shows that the Covid vaccines don’t save lives.

I can’t remember in my lifetime anything being banned other than info about the Covid vaccines. So the only time the government got involved in the constitutionally unlawful banning of a vaccine, it was the Covid vaccine, and there, they screwed the pooch. Based on the only real science we have (the Pfizer RCT), the vaccines did not save lives.

They say that it is indisputable that vaccines save lives, but that’s not the case with the Covid vaccines. The only ones about which information has been banned. And they double down by stating that if anyone says so, “it is a falsehood.” Again, not with the Covid vaccines. With those, it’s the absolute scientific truth.

Since the government screwed up so badly on determining what was misinformation, the AMA and the AAP think the same incompetent folks have a “compelling interest” in “combatting vaccine misinformation.” Jesus wept.

Since I’m not a pediatrician, I don’t know anything about the AAP. But I am a physician and do know some about the AMA. And I think it is an evil organization completely in thrall to and underwritten by the pharmaceutical industry. I haven’t seen the AMA’s financial statement, but I would bet it gets plenty of funding from Big Pharma. And if I had to guess, I would bet that Big Pharma funded this amicus brief. In my view, the AMA represents the interests of the pharmaceutical industry vastly more than it does the interests of its member doctors. Having written that, I don’t know a single doctor who is a member of the AMA. I never have been and neither has any doc I know.

I do know that if this brief sways the Supreme Court, it will be an enormous victory for Big Pharma.

You can read David Zweig’s Substack post on this below. Strangely I haven’t read about this anywhere else.

Viral Transmission

Months ago I read an enlightening book by a doctor named Clare Craig that filled in some of the information gaps left by all the other Covid books I had read.

The book, Expired: Covid the Untold Story, had a section on viral transmissibility that I found almost unbelievable. It was fully referenced, and I intended to go to the references to see if what she wrote was really as she wrote it.

Just about everyone believed that respiratory viruses were transmitted via droplets despite numerous studies showing they were transmitted as aerosols. If they truly were transmitted via droplets, then mask wearing would make some sense. As would scrubbing everything with Purell and other sanitizers. But if viruses are really transmitted as aerosols, then masking and scrubbing and sanitizing and maintaining a six-foot distance from others are all for naught.

In the early days, I read the seminal papers on viral transmission, and it became pretty apparent that the Covid virus and other respiratory viruses were aerosols and floated through the air for fairly long distances. People could breathe them in from across a room and get infected.

When I read what Dr. Craig had written, which was that aerosols could be transmitted over long, long distances, I was a little skeptical, and, as I wrote, I intended to read the references. But life, or more likely, another book, got in the way, and I never got back to checking those references.

I had pretty much forgotten about it until I received a Substack post from one of my many paid Substacks. This one from an academic in the UK, who goes by the pseudonym The Naked Emperor.

In this post, he/she brought up one of the events Dr. Craig had written about. The Naked Emperor expanded on the situation and provided one of the references I never went back and read. Here is Dr. Craig’s description of what happened:

These men were totally isolated in Antarctica and had been for 17 weeks. Then half of them come down with colds, which, for the most part, are coronavirus infections. How did they get infected? It would be unlikely that they had colds that were dormant and then broke out in six people at the same time.

Dr. Craig talks about how another international group of scientists did research on viral transmission in 2018.

Kind of makes wearing masks and standing six feet away from the customer ahead of you in the grocery store checkout line kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it?

Here is another case I found of people in Antarctica coming down with Covid. In this situation the case could be more easily made that there was person to person transmission. But still all the steps were taken—including vaccination—to make sure all personnel were disease free.

The Naked Emperor expanded on Dr. Craig’s description of the Antarctic mission in the late 1960s.

He goes on to talk about how this is the perfect setup to demonstrate whether or not lockdowns are a viable means of preventing viral transmission.

He/she goes on to describe how after 17 weeks of total isolation, six of these men came down with viral upper respiratory illnesses, i.e., bad colds. How did they catch them? They were isolated in a camp in Antarctica with no other humans around. Who could possibly have infected them?

The Naked Emperor speculates that a sudden drop in temperature that occurred just before they got sick might have awakened a latent virus. I’m not buying it. Especially not after going back and rereading the pertinent parts in Expired. Dr. Craig discusses enough cases of transmission at long distance that I suspect that is the most likely cause. Which, if so, makes lockdowns and masks totally useless.

Here is the full Naked Emperor Substack should you want to read more. And here is the link to the full article from 1973.

Okay, time for a quick yes or no poll.

Wt Loss With Semaglutide Causes Muscle Loss

Even Big Pharma knows this. There is a drug in testing right now that brings about as much (or more) weight loss than Wegovy and the rest while increasing muscle mass. But it comes with some nasty side effects. More about which later.

This is the drum I’ve been beating for ages. All everyone seems to think about is weight loss, not what that weight loss is composed of. As I’ve said ad infinitum, your muscle mass is longevity money in the bank.

Now having said that, I’ve got to tell you that some loss of muscle mass with overall weight loss is normal.

Here’s what I mean.

If I were to put you in a 50 pound vest that you had to wear 24/7 you would gain muscle mass simply from having to hog around that extra 50 pounds. If I left it on you for, say, a year, you would gain a fair amount of muscle. If at the end of the year, I let you take it off, you would start losing muscle mass simply because you didn’t need it since you were no longer carting around the 50-pound vest.

Same thing happens when you lose a lot of weight. You don’t need as much muscle as you did when you were 50 pounds heavier.

But you still need to consume plenty of protein. You don’t want to lose too much. You certainly don’t want to lose 40 percent of your lost weight as muscle mass. That’s a bit much. But that’s what happens when you lose your hunger and cut back on eating. Usually, it’s the protein that goes first.

The best thing you can do while you’re actively trying to lose weight is eat more protein and take up resistance training. That will give you the most bang for your buck in terms of retaining, or even increasing, your muscle mass.

As people gain weight, they end up with a lot of fat in their muscle tissue. In a steak, that’s called marbling. When you lose weight while eating plenty of protein and doing strength training, you end up getting rid of the marbling. In many cases, the size of the muscle may decrease because it’s getting rid of the fat. But the actual muscle tissue itself grows. So you end up with more muscle mass yet a smaller size.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the new weight loss drugs on the horizon. If they really do increase muscle mass while generating a pretty good overall weight loss. But muscle can’t be manufactured out of nothing. It has to come from somewhere, and if you’re not eating anything to build it, as people don’t while on Wegovy et al, then it’s going to be stolen from other tissues and organs, which is no good at all.

So even if these drugs are all they’re cracked up to be, you still need to consume protein.

If you read the article linked above, you’ll see that a number of ‘experts’ quoted don’t think the loss of muscle mass is all that important. They even are opposed to DEXA measuring to determine muscle mass loss.

If this is how Randy Seeley, director of the Michigan Nutrition Obesity Research Center, really thinks, then Randy Seeley, in my humble opinion is an effing idiot.

Is that all you want to be able to do? Get up out of a chair? Walk up stairs?

I would assume you would want vastly more than this out of life.

Now about those side effects of the drugs under testing.

So lowering FSH by 90% causes problems, but lowering it by only 70-80% is okay?

I wouldn’t be too sure.

But I’m sure the boffins at the drug companies will fiddle with the chemistry and find a compound that may work to bring about weight loss while maintaining, or even increasing, muscle mass.

It will take a while, though to get it formulated, then get it through all the testing. So don’t plan on anything any time soon.

Speaking of GLP-1 Agonists

I took a run through PubMed a couple of days ago trying to see if low-carb diets had an effect on GLP-1. As you know, GLP-1 agonists (drugs that activate GLP-1 receptors, i.e., Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro, etc.) are the latest weight loss drugs to hit the market.

In every article I found about low-carb diets in which GLP-1 was mentioned, it turns out that low-carb diets increase the amount of GLP-1 in circulation.

So, by following a low-carb diet, you are increasing your GLP-1 levels while at the same time getting plenty of protein to maintain muscle mass while you lose weight. Sounds like a win-win to me.

There are literally dozens of these articles. I haven’t gone through them in detail, mainly because it just occurred to me a few days ago to do the search. In the coming weeks, I’ll do a deeper dive into a few of these studies.

Stick around.

The Arrow is a reader-supported publication. It costs a coffee per week to subscribe. And I’m not talking some fancy, high-end, high-carb, Venti Caramel Frappuccino with Extra Caramel Drizzle and Whipped Cream Starbucks crap; I’m talking a Joes’ Diner drip coffee. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I Scooped the Wall Street Journal

Last week on Thursday I posted the short video of Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes for Health during the Covid fiasco, explaining how people who work in public health think about infectious diseases. In case you missed this short video, here it is again.

Disgusting that someone like this was the head of such an important agency.

The very next day, the Wall Street Journal came out with an editorial about it. The editorial staff obviously feel the same way I do about the situation.

What a putz.

But then popular medical podcaster Dr Vinay Prasad piled on.

Couldn’t happen to a more deserving person. How many marriages, businesses, families, etc. did Francis Collins destroy. He is typical of the bureaucrat class most of us despise.

Gary Taubes’s New Book Now Available

Gary’s new book Rethinking Diabetes is out now. I read it in manuscript form (and gave Gary my suggestions) about a year ago. The book is as much about diet and insulin and the sorry state of science today as it is about diabetes. And like all Gary’s books, it’s a great read. I’ll review it soon.

Links of Interest…At Least to Me

• Media pushes false claim of 2023 being the “hottest in 125,000 years.”

• The Real Cause of Climate Grief. Matt Briggs Substack today. If you really want to be disgusted, read the two articles he links to in this piece.

• Covid mask mandates return in California, Illinois, and New York. Anyone have any idea how these states are similar?

• Matt Mullenweg’s travel bag. A lot of cool stuff here.

• Fun quiz. Asking pronunciation of a handful of words can identify the region from which you hale. MD and I both were solidly South. h/t Morning Brew

• Ozempic factory fails inspection as demand for the weight loss drug grows.

• For those who are interested, here is a list of countries and the average age at which people lose their virginity. I can’t verify the statistics.

• Animal chiropractor adjusting dogs. Makes me wonder a) if these are typical outcomes, and b) how many times he’s been bitten.

• Interesting history of the development of Ozempic.

• The surprising superpower of America’s bison population.

• Time restricted eating, i.e., intermittent fasting, reduces markers of inflammation.

• EU to force X to shut down if Musk does not ban independent media from the platform. I hope he tells them to jump up a fat dog’s ass.

• Climate Scientists Say We Should Embrace Higher CO2 Levels.

• Dept of Justice decides not to try SBF a 2nd time. Interesting because this is the trial about his fraudulent use of the funds he stole. Which mainly went for political donations to Democrats. All of whom would be outed and expected to cough up these fraudulent donations.

• Dead Sea Scrolls at the Museum of the Bible are all forgeries.

• Study shows moderate low-carb diet good for those with Type 1 diabetes. In my view, a strict low-carb diet would work better.

Video of the Week

I chose this one for a couple of reasons. First, it just seems appropriate to start the New Year out with such an uplifting piece of music. Second, because my lovely wife didn’t get taken from me this past year when the Santa Barbara Symphony performed it. She decided to sit it out.

She says she loves to listen to Ode to Joy, but kind of dreads to sing it. Apparently it’s hell for sopranos. She’s sung it many times, but decided not to earlier this year because we were out of the country. So I had her with me instead of in rehearsal.

It’s a glorious piece. And this is a lovely performance.

Now for the weekly poll on my performance.

Okay, that’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

And don’t forget to help me out by clicking the Like button, assuming, of course, that you liked it.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Really, thanks. If you got something out of it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I would really appreciate it.

Finally, don’t forget to take a look at what our kind sponsors have to offer. Dry Farm Wines, HLTH Code, Precision Health Reports, The Hustle (free), and now The Morning Brew (also free)