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Hello everyone.

Announcement: There may not be an Arrow next week. MD and I are sneaking off for a little vacation, and I’m not sure I’ll have the time to whip out an entire Arrow. I’ll send something, but it will likely be abbreviated. The week after next, will be on schedule.

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Heath Versus Fitness

I received a number of comments and emails last week from people who noticed a not-insignificant number of members of the renown Arkansas Razorback marching band were, let’s say, a bit chunkier than one would expect. Given the amount of practice and exercise these kids do, one would think they would all be skinny. But, alas, such is not always the case.

Although it seems inconceivable, some people can be extraordinarily fit, yet not particularly heathy or necessarily thin. A perfect case was Jim Fixx, the guy who started the whole jogging craze in the US back in the 1970s with his book The Complete Book of Running. He died at age 52 while out jogging. He had heart disease and a number of other conditions. He was fit, but he wasn’t particularly healthy.

The kids in the Razorback marching band who are overweight are sort of in the same position. They are definitely fit, but given their degree of obesity, they may not be particularly healthy. They have youth going for them right now, but if they don’t take some kind of action, by the time they’re 30, they could be developing some serious problems.

Some people commenting were amazed that any of these kids could be in the least overweight given the amount of exercise they have to do to rehearse and perform while at almost a dead run.

I don’t know who said it first, but there is an old saying out there that is absolutely true: You can’t outrun a bad diet.

Diet totally trumps exercise when it comes to weight loss. Many studies have shown that increasing exercise doesn’t really help people lose weight…unless there is dieting involved. Exercise is a good way to work up an appetite, and after exercise, most people are hungry. They end up consuming more calories than they did doing whatever exercise they did. And if they’re eating a crappy diet, it’s going to be crappy calories.

People tend to overestimate the number of calories they burn when exercising and underestimate the number of calories in the food they eat.

A few Arrows back, I wrote about how a 176 pound person who runs a 5K at a good clip would burn about 350 calories above basal metabolic rate. Coming in from this 5k, this person is going to be hungry. So, let’s say there is a McDonald’s close by, and he heads for it. If he eats just one serving of McDonald’s French fries, he ends up with 341 calories, which almost totally replace what he burned running the 5K. But, odds are, he’ll eat a lot more than just a single order of fries.

I’m sure our 176 pound person would never suspect he burned only 350 calories running a 5k, and I doubt he would believe he could replace almost all of it with an order of McDonald’s fries and nothing else. But there it is.

RFK, Jr’s Threat to the Medical Journal - Pharmaceutical Racket

This threat is long, long overdue, and I hope Bobby K brings it off. Jeff Childers wrote a bit on it today, but he just scratched the surface.

It’s not only Richard Horten from The Lancet who lambasts the unholy bond between the medical publishing industry and the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Marcia Angell, who was the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine commented on it widely and even wrote a book about the corruption of medicine by Big Pharma.

Most people don’t understand how the medical publishing business works. If they did, everyone would want to get into the business.

In the case of regular periodicals—People, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, and just about any other periodical you could imagine—writers get paid to write. If it’s a big time article requiring a lot of research, the magazines pay for it. And if you purchase one of these magazines, it sets you back five or six bucks. These purchases, subscriptions, and ads in the magazines make up the magazine’s income. Out of that comes the writers fees and all the other overhead. It’s a low margin business, which is why the magazine business is in big trouble and why so many that have been around so long have folded. Or are near collapse.

Not true in the medical/scientific publishing biz. They’ve got a tremendous deal going. It’s about the reverse of the regular magazine business with a lot of extra goodies thrown in.

Medical/scientific journals couldn’t exist without the scientists who publish in them. But instead of paying these scientists, most journals charge them for publishing. That’s right. The scientists have to pay to publish.

When the scientists decide to do a research project, they end up being funded not by any journal, but by government grants or drug companies. The grants (and the drug companies’ stipends) end up paying the fees the journals charge to publish.

You’ve got a situation in which the government or the drug companies (or, in some cases, independent researchers) are paying to do all the extremely expensive research and the writing of the articles. The journals don’t pay a dime. In fact, as I said, many of them get paid to publish.

Even the fact checkers are not paid for not by the journals. These are the peer reviewers we’ve all heard so much about. They generally do their peer review gratis.

The journals are responsible for determining if the articles submitted are worthwhile to publish. And they do undertake some due diligence to weed out fraud, but given the numbers of articles that are retracted—even from the most prestigious journals—they could probably do better.

If you want to purchase a subscription to, say, Vanity Fair, you can do so for $18 for the first year, going up to $48 after the first year.

If you want to subscribe to a scientific journal as an individual, it can run anywhere from $100 to $700 or $800 depending upon the journal. If you happen to be a medical library, you end up forking over thousands of dollars for each journal. That’s not an exaggeration. If and when you ever go into a medical school library and look at the number of journals they have available, just imagine the chunk of their budget that represents.

The scientific journals don’t have a lot of overhead—printing, postage, staff—yet have pretty massive income just from subscriptions.

But that isn’t all.

They also are chock full of ads, primarily for pharmaceuticals. And although I don’t know what the prices are for these ads, I doubt they are inexpensive.

But that still isn’t all. There’s more!

One of the reasons medical journals love drug studies and select them over others is that they end up making money on those.

When you’re a doc in a busy practice, one of the banes of your existence is drug detail people. They show up at your clinic randomly, sit in your waiting room till you’ve got a free minute, then detail you on the latest drug they’re promoting. They always give you a slick, printed copy of a journal article or two showing how the particular drug of the day is effective.

(In case you’re wondering, there were two reasons I even saw drug detail people. One was to learn about any new drugs; the second—and most important—was to get samples, which they always left. Both MD and I liked to have samples around to give to sick patients to get them started, so they wouldn’t immediately have to go from our clinic to the pharmacy.)

These slickly-printed articles are produced by the journals on their presses and sold to the drug companies for a couple of bucks apiece. The drug companies—this is just a guess—must purchase them by at least the tens of thousands.

Which is why medical journals love papers on drug studies. And why they may give the nod to a study on a drug over a study on nutrition. And why they may look the other way if the study appears a little dodgy. They make a lot of money on publishing drug studies.

The fact that they publish questionable drug studies because they are so profitable is why RFK, Jr. wants to have NIH create its own journals so NIH scientists publish in-house. It’s a way to punish the medical/scientific journal industry from collaborating with Big Pharma and to ensure the reliability of the studies published.

I hope it’s not just a hollow threat. The journal industry needs some competition and accountability.

LDL-C Levels and Heart Disease Risk

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned a time or two, I’m on an academic email list primarily about the science of low-carb dieting. But there are a lot of peripheral subjects that come up.

An email came to the group a few days ago from Dr. David Diamond about LDL-cholesterol. He was bemoaning the fact that when people published studies on low-carb diets or anything else for that matter, they were all relieved if their diet didn’t end up raising LDL-Cholesterol levels. He basically said everyone should realize LDL-C isn’t really a risk factor for heart disease, and we shouldn’t worry if it goes up.

He included a copy of his latest paper (of which he is the co-author) on the lack of value of trying to keep LDL-C under 70 mg/dl, which is the number statinators shoot for. The paper is a summary of the research on the subject and ends up stating

I started out in medicine being one of the people Dr. Diamond was criticizing, but that was long, long, long ago.

When I first started really studying cholesterol—other than the little I learned about it n medical school biochemistry—was when I started doing research for Protein Power. At that time, in the early 1990s, I was totally on board with the idea that cholesterol, especially LDL-C, was the main causative factor of heart disease. I was squarely in the middle of the mainstream.

Where I started having issues is with the admonition every mainstream doc gave to their patients about avoiding red meat, eggs, cheese, and saturated fats in general in an effort to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease. My problem with all that stemmed from the fact that most all of my patients on low-carb diets had their cholesterol levels fall.

I couldn’t figure out why everyone thought cholesterol would go up on a high-saturated fat diet, yet my own patients, whose labs I saw with my own eyes, had a different response.

I decided I needed to look into the whole cholesterol pathway to see if I could find something that made sense.

When I looked up the cholesterol synthesis pathway in my old med school biochem book, I saw that the rate-limiting enzyme was one called hydroxymethylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase. Now, fortunately, the name has been shortened to HMG-CoA reductase.

Every substance the body synthesizes goes through a pathway much like an assembly line in a factory. At each step along the way, something is added or changed. And like an assembly line, there is one worker who is the slowest worker. No matter how fast everyone else works, the slowest worker is who determines the overall output.

In biochemical terms that worker is called the rate-limiting enzyme. No matter how fast the other enzymes crank product along the line, it’s the slowest working one—the rate-limiting enzyme—that determines the output. If you can speed up or slow down the rate-limiting enzyme, then you and increase or decrease the rate of production of the end product.

In the case of cholesterol production, HMG-CoA reductase is the rate-limiting enzyme. So if you want to decrease the production of cholesterol, all you have to do is inhibit HMG-CoA reductase, and you’ll produce less cholesterol. Statins are HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors.

Here is a graphic showing the enzyme production line.

If you look at the top of this synthesis pathway, you’ll see I’ve put a red oval around HMG-CoA reductase. At the very bottom of the pathway, you can see cholesterol identified. So when statins inhibit the function of HMG-CoA reductase, they reduce all the products downstream, many of which are important for other functions. But it reduces cholesterol synthesis as well, which is what everyone wanted.

Once I had all this scoped out, I wanted to know if there were any other enzymes or hormones that might affect HMG-CoA reductase. Again, back to the textbooks. This time I found that insulin activated HMG-CoA reductase while glucagon inhibited HMG-CoA reductase.

Voilà! I had my answer. If insulin activated and glucagon inhibited the activity of HMG-CoA reductase, then it made perfect sense that a low-carb diet would lower cholesterol levels. On a low-carb diet, insulin goes down and glucagon goes up. It was the perfect set up for lowering cholesterol levels.

About the same time I had this epiphany, I had four patients who fell into my hands that pretty much confirmed what I had divined from all of my textbook reading. You can read about them here. The TL,DR is that I had four patients come to me over the course of about three months that had huge lipid issues, and I mean huge. I put them all on low-carb diets with a lot of supervision, and in just a few weeks all had pretty much normalized consuming a diet the mainstreamers would swear would put them over the edge lipid-wise.

But ultimately, I ended up with a handful of patients whose LDL-C levels went up and not down on a low-carb diet. Most were not that overweight to begin with—I don’t think I’ve ever had a substantially overweight patient with deranged lipids that didn’t improve on a low-carb diet. One of the patients was our own dietitian, whom we hired because we had to for a study we were doing. She wasn’t overweight at all; she was a distance runner. She had heard the stories from some of our regular patients about improved energy and strength, so she went on a low-carb diet to see if it would help her running.

It did improve her times, but she ended up with her LDL-C going up. In retrospect, I now figure she was a lean-mass hyper responder. I wish I had known those existed at the time.

The other patients whose LDL-C levels went up on the low-carb diet, I got direct LDL-C labs on. Most people don’t realize that even today LDL-C is usually not measured directly. It is calculated using the Friedewald or other similar equations, which, depending upon triglyceride levels, can make LDL-C calculate to higher than it really is.

About this same time, tests were developed to look at LDL-C particle size. As it turns out, there are two types of LDL-C particles: the large, buoyant type and the small dense type. An abundance of the former—called a type A pattern—appears actually helpful, while an abundance of the small, dense ones—called the type B pattern—appears troublesome.

At the time, the tests for these were fairly expensive, so I asked the patients with elevated LDL-C what they wanted to do. Probably three quarters of them wanted to test for peace of mind. All of them came out as type A, the large, fluffy, harmless ones.

As time went on, I read as much as I could on LDL-C and heart disease. The more I read, the more I came to believe that high-LDL-C was not a driving force behind heart disease. I read all the original statin studies, none of which showed any real decrease in all-cause mortality. They showed that non-fatal heart attacks and fatal heart attacks were reduced, but with no reduction in all-cause mortality. Which, of course, means that the statins may offer some protection against heart disease, but at the expense of causing something else — cancer or other issues that increased all-cause mortality.

To this day, I have not ever written a statin prescription. I’ve taken a lot of folks off of them, though.

Now I’m firmly of the opinion that LDL-C doesn’t really matter a whole lot. And I understand why David Diamond is a bit perturbed because people are so relieved that their studies don’t show an increase in LDL-C. By constantly commenting on the fact that a given study didn’t drive LDL-C up makes it seem that there is something bad about LDL-C when I’m convinced there really isn’t.

Book Recommendations

I’ve studied WWII a lot and know a great deal about that conflict. I know a lot less about WWI, which is a shame, because my beloved grandfather was a scout in the Meuse–Argonne offensive, which was the deadliest battle in US history. Not many scouts made it out alive. I spent countless hours with my grandfather, and he was willing to talk about the war. I just wasn’t interested at the time. And I’ve been pissed ever since that I didn’t make the effort to learn more from an actual combatant.

I know almost absolutely nothing about the Vietnam war or conflict or whatever you want to call it. And I lived through it. Was within a cat’s whisker of being drafted into it. Avoided it only because it ended before they got me. Yet I’ve almost no curiosity about it. I know 500 times more (if not more than that) about WWII than I do about a war conducted during my own lifetime that took the lives of people my own age that I knew.

I saw a recommendation for a new book on the Vietnam war, and I thought to myself that I really should know more about that conflict than I do, so I went to Amazon and gave it a look. Before purchasing a book on Amazon, I always read the mini-review (which is always positive, because they want to sell books), then I turn to the sample provided of the actual book. Many times I’m put off by the author’s style of writing that seems like a struggle to read. God knows I read a-plenty, but I hate authors who seem to purposefully make their writing difficult to read. The point of writing is to clearly communicate, not obfuscate, after all.

The review on this book simply titled The Vietnam War: A Military History by Geoffrey Wawro, an author I had never heard of, didn’t give me much info. So then I turned to the sample to see how the author’s writing read.

All I can say is that I was dazzled. The author’s prose is absolutely a delight to read. It doesn’t even feel like you’re reading; your eyes just move along the page absorbing the information effortlessly. How I wish all books were this well written.

Since I had never heard the name Geoffrey Wawro, I looked him up. Given the pleasure of his prose, I assumed he would be a professional writer hired to crank out a book on the Vietnam War. As it turns out, he has about a million degrees from universities all over the world and is a military historian. If only all highly-educated people could write this well…

It’s a long book—800+ pages—so I haven’t gotten through it yet. But it is an absolute delight to read. Maybe it will turn to crap in the last 500 pages, but somehow I doubt it. If you want to learn about the Vietnam War as painlessly as possible, this is the book for you.

Okay, this next book falls into the category of a little more difficult to read. If I had read the Vietnam book before this one, I might have abandoned it early on, but I didn’t. I read it first.

The book titled On Grand Strategy by Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis is as described by its title. It’s about how to develop a grand strategy to deal with major events in life. Gaddis recognizes that wants are infinite, but resources are limited. Even for kings and emperors. He looks at how a host of historical figures either solved this problem or ended up defeated or dead. He makes the point that too many people put too much focus on the prize and not nearly enough on whether or not the resources are available to attain the prize. (A situation I have fallen into a number of times in my own life. Fortunately, not with a fatal outcome.)

It was amazing to me to learn about how many kings, emperors, generals, and others went down to defeat or were totally destroyed or had their kingdom destroyed by not saying what if? What if I don’t have enough men for this battle? Of what if I don’t have enough money in the treasury to see this process through?

And to learn as well of those who did it right and pulled off the grand strategy. The thrust of the book is about developing a grand strategy instead of just launching off into battle or investing or whatever else without thinking about your limited resources.

The grandest strategy is doing the best you can with what you have, while ensuring you don’t go down to defeat along the way.

It’s an excellent book, but it is not as pleasurable a reading experience as the Vietnam War book. Still highly recommended just for its content, though you have to work a bit to dig it out.

Are Excess Deaths In the US Vaccine Related?

I haven’t written about the Covid vaccines in a while, mainly because I don’t want to worry people. All of us fall into one of two categories. Either we’ve taken the Covid vaccine or we haven’t. Those who have taken it can’t untake it, so I don’t like to post scare stories, because there is nothing those who have taken the shots can do but worry. We all probably have too many things to worry about as it is without my adding to the list.

Given how duplicitous the mainstream media is, it’s difficult to ferret out the truth. The mainstream media is on the payroll of Big Pharma, so you’re never going to hear anything anti-vaccine, no matter how bad it might be. Since Bill Clinton allowed pharmaceutical advertising on TV in the late 1990s, the drug companies have had a field day.

I don’t even think they’re advertising their drugs. I think it’s just a way for them to give money to the media in order to control them and the narrative. If they get most of their money from Big Pharma, they ain’t going to rat on Big Pharma by spending too much time investigating them. Nothin’ to see here; move along.

Take a look at this short commercial for the diabetes drug Jardiance. Note that the commercial isn’t as much about the drug as it is the long list of side effects—many fatal—that might befall you if you take it. Do you think a lot of people are badgering their doctors for this drug after watching this commercial? I wouldn’t think so. So why run it other than as a conduit for money to keep the media in line.

You’re not going to get the truth on vaccines and any kinds of problems they might cause from the media, so you have to go to other sources. But sometimes those other sources are as bad as the media in the opposite way.

A couple of weeks ago, Alex Berenson reported on excess deaths in Bulgaria, of all places, and compared them to excess deaths in the US. I think his analysis is on the money, so let’s take a look.

Bulgaria is a poor, Eastern European country without much going for it. The citizens don’t have a great life expectancy and have a lot of chronic disease. The Covid vaccination rate was extremely low in Bulgaria and deaths from Covid were high. The high rate of Covid deaths is understandable due to the large underlying rate of chronic disease. Most people who died from Covid everywhere had several co-morbidities. Covid was not a disease that killed the healthy in any large numbers.

A year or two ago I wrote about typical excess death patterns when an infectious disease tears through a country. Each country has a baseline excess deaths curve. In years when there isn’t a bad flu or other respiratory disease, usually the total deaths for the country are below the excess deaths curve. Then when something bad comes along, it kills the vulnerable, many of whom would have died the year before had some other disease hit them.

You’ve got the vulnerable from the year or two before the disease and the vulnerable from the year the disease hits. When all of these vulnerable people die as a consequence of the disease, then there are fewer vulnerable people left. All those dying send the death curve way above the excess death curve. But the next year, since there are so many fewer vulnerable people, there are many fewer deaths, so the death curve then goes back below the excess death curve.

Here are some graphics I put together to show this. The first is just what a typical death vs excess deaths chart would show when a bad flu comes around every few years or so.

This is typical. Bad respiratory viruses end up killing the vulnerable and driving death rates above the excess death rates line. The following year(s) there are fewer deaths, because fewer vulnerable people are around to die.

Here is what it looks like blown up for just a year. Deaths go up, then they come down.

This is precisely what happened in Bulgaria. Since vaccine rates were so low in that country, nature kind of took its course, so it ended up looking like the graphic above.

From Alex Berenson’s post:

As you can see, the death rates held steady for 2016-2019 at about 107,000-108,000, then shot up in 2020 and ever further in 2021. It gradually dropped back off of the next couple of years. Then in 2023 and 2024 the death rate was way lower than it was before the pandemic. This is the typical outcome.

If you look at the US death statistics, you see a different picture. This again from the Berenson article.

Like Bulgaria, the US held steady in 2018-2019. When Covid struck in 2020, the rate kicked up and went up even further in 2021. The death rates started back down in 2022, but haven’t gotten back to pre-Covid levels.

The curve of that scenario would look like this:

As you can see, the death rates are still up in the US. Given the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people who died, the death curve didn’t follow the dotted blue line like it should have above. Which tells us there are still excess deaths. We just don’t know why.

Is it mRNA vaccines? The lasting effects of Covid? Something else? We just don’t know at this time. But what we do know is that, at least compared to the Bulgarians, who were barely vaccinated, we are not following the typical vacillation around the excess death line. Most Bulgarians were unvaccinated whereas 82 percent of Americans got at least one Covid shot. The lightly vaccinated Bulgarians are where they should be on the death curves, while we are still way, way high.

Ron Johnson Interview

Below is an interview Tucker Carlson did with Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin, about a host of subjects. The first and longest part of the interview is about the debt situation in the US. That part interested me the least, probably because I think Johnson and other spending hawks are on the wrong path.

They are correct in what they see, they just have the wrong approach to getting out of the situation. At least in my humble opinion.

The US is horribly in debt and paying a ton of money to service the debt. Most of the budget is on auto-pilot, because of non-discretionary spending.

I like to look at the debt situation a little differently. I vacillated in university whether to do economics or engineering. My father, who had no clue what an economist did, persuaded me to go the engineering route. I love what I learned in engineering, but so did I love economics. Had I gone the economist route, I probably wouldn’t have switched careers and gone to medical school. So here we are.

I look at our government like a family heavily in debt with credit cards. The fam started out living within their means, but it was kind of stark in the early days. Then they got a credit card and were able to give a bump to their otherwise spartan lifestyle. They then got another credit card and another and another. Each one improved their lifestyle until the interest payments on the credit cards became such that all they were paying every month was interest on the cards, the minimum principle, and their basic expenses to live. They were back in the same place they started, because all their money went to essentials and credit card payments.

The family goes to Ron Johnson for advice on how to get out of the mess they’re in, and he tells them, You’ve just got to cut your spending.

They say Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, Ron, we have no spending presently to cut. Everything we’ve got coming in goes to essentials or credit card payments, what spending can we cut?

All the deficit hawks look at is the debt and cutting spending. But there is no room to cut spending. OK there is defense, but that’s a special case. It’s almost a non-discretionary item, though I don’t know why.

The deficit hawks say we’ve got to quit spending and we’ve got to raise taxes until we can get out of this mess. Problem is, every time taxes are raised, revenue falls. Not immediately, but as soon as people figure out how to game the new tax system.

What the family could do is put the wife to work. (Or the husband, if he is a stay at home guy.) Or one of the pair could get a better job with more income. Or a second job.

In terms of government, all it takes is a tax cut. Every time taxes have been cut, going all the way back to JFK, which is as far as I’ve looked, government revenues have gone up. It makes sense. When it becomes easier to just pay the lowered taxes than it is trying to avoid them, people and businesses pay, and revenue rises.

All these deficit hawks should be pushing for tax cuts, and give the Democrats some of their spending to get them to go along.

I think the increased revenue would allow us to pay down the debt and improve the economy vastly quicker than trying to cut spending that is difficult to cut.

Okay, that wasn’t the part of the video I was intending for you to watch. I just got carried away. Here is the video cued to the part I found most interesting. In case the cueing does’t work, it starts at 1:03:39.

Senator Johnson starts out right off the bat talking about statins. He had been on a statin for some time and developed a bunch of side effects including a sudden onset hearing loss. He was put on statins because a doctor found plaque in his left anterior descending (LAD) coronary artery, sometimes called the Widowmaker. He went on the statins, had multiple side effects, and ended up getting a coronary catheterization. He says his doc who did the cath told him he wished his “plumbing was as clean as yours.”

Coronary catheterizations look at the interior lumen or channel in the artery, which, in Sen Johnson’s case, was wide open. Clean plumbing. Coronary calcium scans look at the amount of plaque. You can have a fair amount of plaque and still have a wide open tube through it. If that’s the case, you’ll have plenty of blood flow through that coronary artery.

He goes on to talk about how he suffered from GERD for many years and took all the GERD drugs with all their side effects. Then when he started meeting with all the physicians who were treating Covid patients with all the medications Fauci and the rest of the mainstream docs were pooh-poohing, one of them told him about a better way to treat GERD.

This is right along with what I figured out. The doc told him he wasn’t suffering from an overload of stomach acid that had to be knocked out with one of the prescription GERD medicines; he was suffering from a lack of stomach acid. The doc recommended he take an OTC hydrochloric acid pill. Which he started to take and got rid of his GERD almost immediately. When I read about the same thing in a book ten years ago or whenever, I didn’t take the hydrochloric acid pills. Instead I quit drinking so much fluid with meals, so as not to dilute the stomach acid.

When I ate, I didn’t chew and swallow as much as I just washed my food down with water. I went through multiple glasses of water at every meal along with whatever else—wine, beer, whiskey—I was drinking. I stopped all the water. Took more time chewing my food—which was more difficult than I thought it would be—and got rid of my own GERD quickly.

I encourage you to watch the interview. Sen Johnson has had the same sort of epiphanies I’ve had about vaccines, Covid treatments, Big Pharma advertising, and a lot more. I got my epiphanies from reading and studying; he got his by people coming to his office with all these problems. He couldn’t turn them away, so he talked to docs, had hearings, and learned.

For those of you who have taken the Covid vaccines and are still with us, I have some good news. Based on the research he has done and all the people he has talked to, he believes that there were some really bad batches. Most people who had serious issues had them immediately upon taking the shot or within one or two days. So if you’re still here and doing well, you probably avoided what he calls the hot batches.

The one thing he has learned that I was happy to hear him say is that our own government lies to us all the time. I had already pretty much figured that out, but it was nice to hear it from someone in charge.

Odds and Ends

• New research tracking thousands of real first dates found that women prefer younger men just as much as men prefer younger women. But since this is a psychological study, I trust it about as far as I can throw it. Way too much room for fiddling with data.

• Great Ted Gioia piece on how the entire world wide web is becoming a series of fortresses. No one wants to share—they all want captives.

• Scientists discover a hidden clue as to why men are taller than women. Interesting, but complex, explanation.

• Scientists discover sketch by Leonardo da Vinci leads to secret tunnels under an ancient castle.

• During meeting, Dr. Bhattacharya questions NIH’s Role in COVID-19 origins, sparks mass employee walkout. Should be followed by mass employee firings, if you ask me.

• Four coffee myths debunked by science. Okay, my confirmation bias is on full alert here, because I love coffee. Nice studies on dehydration and caffeine difference in roasts. Weird disclosure at the end.

• This is surreal to me. CNN’s Jake Tapper Is selling a book on Biden’s dementia cover-up after he, himself, was more than complicit in the cover-up. I don’t know why people don’t laugh in his face.

• A land bridge through a lost ocean allowed elephants and apes to migrate between Africa and Asia.

• Great article on archaic Homo sapiens, who came after us, yet have more primitive features.

• The world’s oldest forest—located in Cairo, New York (who knew?)—has 385-million-year-old tree roots.

• If you’ve ever wanted to spend a night in prison, but didn’t want to commit the crime to do the time, here are some options.

• Did you know bananas are technically berries? Neither did I till I read this article. Now I’m totally confused. All I really know for sure is that I love drupes.

• There was a small town called Doveland in the middle of Wisconsin. Until suddenly there wasn’t in the 1990s. What happened to Doveland. No one, it seems, appears to know.

• Poison ivy is poison for the same reason Tylenol is toxic.

• What megalodon really ate to meet its 100,000-calorie daily requirement. Apparently, like herbivores, it ate throughout the day.

• Finally, a change for the better. How the beef industry Is quietly rewriting climate science for kids. Students do learn about methane, but not about eating less meat.

• Artificial Intelligence data centers draw same power as 2 million homes. And all of a sudden, AI gets a full pardon for wrecking the climate change scheme, even as they say they will save us from climate change.

• 24 school cafeteria recipes that'll spark nostalgia. The only one that sparked nostalgia for me was the Sloppy Joe. I love Sloppy Joes, yet I never ate one anywhere but in a school cafeteria lunch.

• Scientists date the oldest known tools made from whale bones to 20,000 years ago, which was a surprise to me. I figured early humans made tools from whale bones a lot earlier than that.

• Here’s one from the “Only in California files:” Abandoned bear cub is being raised by a couple wearing bear suits.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

The Led Zeppelin rock anthem 'Stairway to Heaven' came out the year MD graduated high school -- 1971. It was unusual, in that it was an exceedingly long song for FM radio play. And yet it caught fire. It persisted. What was it about the song that set it apart? For one thing, its unusual structure. Instead of the standard verse-chorus formula, 'Stairway' is more of a linear journey than a repeating loop. With unusual harmonies and a structure that builds from a complex, intricate beginning that moves into a steady, rhythmic middle section, and finally to an explosive final section, it's simply not your standard 70's pop rock tune. So enjoy this tribute performance! It appears in this video that the Zeppelins present did.

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

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

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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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