Sponsored by

Want chef-crafted, dietitian-designed meals ready in 2 minutes?

Try Factor, America's #1 ready-to-eat meal delivery service.

Made from ingredients you recognize. Whole food. Nothing unnecessary. Let’s eat real.

Get 50% off your first Factor box + Free Breakfast for a year *1 free breakfast item per box for 1 year while subscription active.

Try Factor Now

This version of The Arrow is going to be a sort of potpourri. An expanded version of the Odds & Ends. As I’ve complained about numerous times in this newsletter, I am constantly plagued by an overabundance of tabs on whatever browser I happen to be using at the moment.

I read a lot (both books and online), and whenever I come across something in my online reading and think, Hey, this could be a topic for The Arrow, I tab it. So writing this edition accomplishes two things: getting rid of tabs and generating Arrow content.

Before I launch off on the potpourri, let me start with a comment I received.

In the last Arrow, I mentioned a paper about a nutritional supplement the authors described as inhibiting DPP-4, the enzyme that destroys native GLP-1. I wrote that I suspected the authors were testing a proprietary product they had developed to be able to advertise and sell it.

I wrote that I couldn’t find the supplement they were describing. But a sharp-eyed reader did.

West and Swartz are the two authors on the paper. Like the reader, I have no affiliation with the company or with the authors.

But just because the authors who wrote the paper are selling the product does not mean it doesn’t work. In order to make any kind of claims about a product in the US market, one has to have at least one (more are better) study to document the claims. If you try to sell it without documentation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will be all over you at some point.

Or, more correctly, if you sell a lot of the product the FTC will be all over you. If your sales are small, even if you are claiming that your product cures cancer and reverses baldness, the FTC doesn’t really care. The FTC isn’t out to protect the public, it is after headlines. The folks there want to show the public what a marvelous job they are doing. But they can’t really do that by taking down a company that sells only a few thousands of dollars worth of product. They want to find the ones that constantly advertise and sell in the millions.

Due to the vast advertising budget and constant TV ads, the public is aware of those kinds of products. When the FTC slams the operators, the public notices. And big headlines ensue.

The mindset of those who run the FTC is that supplements of almost any kind don’t work for whatever they’re advertised to do. So some small lab creates a product based on basic biochemistry, spends a fortune to recruit subjects to test it, makes claims based on the study results, sells the product to satisfied customers (almost always offering a no-questions-asked return policy) then gets slammed by the FTC.

Compare that to what happens to the drug companies. Their ads don’t get policed by the FTC. They get policed by the FDA. When a drug company goes overboard on ads about their product, they get a polite letter from the FDA asking them to change their ad. When a regular citizen comes up with a product – even if it works and customers love it – the first notice they receive from the FTC is a civil investigative demand, the dreaded CID letter. And that’s just the easy part of it.

It's a typical example of the difference between big business and small business. Small businesses fear the government; large businesses view the government as an ATM machine.

I speak from bitter experience on this subject. I was a part of a small mom and pop kind of company that developed a product, tested it, and sold it. Sales were great, but then the FTC came calling. We ended up beating them back in what our lawyer called a one in a thousand, grand slam homerun. But it cost us over half a million dollars and destroyed the company.

But back to the DPP-4 inhibiting product… Like the reader who tracked it down, I have no experience with this supplement, so I cannot provide any type of endorsement. If anyone decides to give it a try, please let me know the results, and I’ll pass them along.

Measles in Pennsylvania

I’m sure most of you read or heard about the alleged deaths of two children from measles in Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro, the PA governor, publicly reported the deaths at a press conference called for that reason. He has been accused of using these deaths for political purposes. Since I have no clue what he was thinking, I don’t know whether he was politicking or not, but based on some of the non-trad media I’ve seen, I’m not sure he is even accurate.

According to the coroner all measles deaths have to be reported to the PA state medical records office. And apparently these deaths weren’t reported. One of the deaths (I haven’t read anything about the other) was reported as being caused by splenic rupture during delivery. Measles came into the picture because the mother had measles and the baby tested positive for the measles.

The trad media outcry after Shapiro’s press conference has been that these two deaths were unnecessary and would have been prevented had the mother been vaccinated. (Apparently she hadn’t been as she couldn’t recall having been vaccinated as a child. She is Amish, and the Amish typically don’t vaccinate. I’m not a student of the Amish religion, but based upon what I have read, vaccination is not prohibited. Some vaccinate, but most don’t.)

And, of course, über vaccinator Paul Offit was all over it in the medical press.

I’ve never heard of measles causing splenic rupture, which doesn’t mean squat as I’m not a pediatrician (though I have treated my share of sick kids). I searched PubMed using the search term “measles AND splenic rupture” and found only one citation. And it wasn’t even about measles; it was about mononucleosis, which notoriously causes enlargement of the spleen.. I pulled the paper and read it, and I couldn’t find a mention of measles and splenic rupture. But since I skimmed it (it’s a long paper) instead of reading it carefully, I sent it to my good friend Perplexity dot AI to read. Perplexity agreed with me. There is no mention of measles and splenic rupture.

I had also asked Perplexity to make a run through the medical literature to see if it could find a case. It came back negative. But it did suggest that I use a more complex request to PubMed to see if it turned anything up. The query it suggested was: (measles OR rubeola OR Morbillivirus OR "congenital measles") AND ("splenic rupture" OR "rupture of spleen" OR "splenic laceration"
OR "atraumatic splenic rupture" OR "spontaneous splenic rupture").

I ran the search and it came back with the same study I found on my original search, i.e., the one on mononucleosis. You can try it yourself.

I’ve seen a lot of pro-vax physicians writing here and there about the splenic rupture being caused by the measles. But if so, it would be the first case reported in the medical literature.

All of our kids were inoculated with the measles vaccine years ago (they’re all in their late 40s to mid 50s now). But if I had it to go over again, I wouldn’t have had it done.

This despite the fact that the measles vaccine is one of the, if not the, most effective vaccines available.

Why would I now refuse it for my own kids?

A few reasons. First, the measles vaccine – despite being effective – is not completely effective. Depending upon the statistics I’ve read, somewhere between 2 percent and 10 percent of those vaccinated get the measles years later. In other words, for a substantial chunk of people, the vaccine wears off. Getting the measles doesn’t. Getting the measles confers lifelong immunity.

Second, the measles vaccine causes some serious problems for some kids who get it. There are more vaccine-related deaths reported through VAERS than there are deaths from measles.

A few issues with this graphic. First, it has been documented that VAERS picks up somewhere in the neighborhood of only 2-3 percent of the actual deaths, because for the most part, people don’t report to VAERS. Doing so is voluntary and requires a lot of hassle. Consequently, it’s the deaths from the measles vaccine that go underreported, not the deaths caused by measles infection. The various state health services require all cases of measles and death from measles to be reported.

If the VAERS chart were accurate, there would be vastly more deaths from the measles vaccine reported than what is shown.

Second, if there were no measles vaccine, the deaths from measles would be vastly greater than what is shown.

Which is the real gist of the problem.

If half of kids across all socio-economic backgrounds were vaccinated and half were not vaccinated, the chart above would have some value. But since most kids are vaccinated, and most vaccine deaths aren’t reported to VAERS, the chart is almost meaningless in terms of telling people what is best for their kids.

Which is what randomized, controlled trials are designed to do. But as I’ve said repeatedly there are no such trials in the research archives. And anytime anyone proposes one, the public health services scream bloody murder.

Third, we have no idea what the outcome later in life is for those who have been vaccinated versus those who had the measles. As a people, we’ve evolved with measles. We have no idea whether or not suffering for a week or so with a childhood disease helps us prevent other problems when we’re older. Sounds kind of dumb to think of it in that way, but it is a consideration.

A few months ago, I discussed a Japanese paper by Kubota et al that appeared in a prestigious journal in 2015 looking at this very thing. It was not a randomized, controlled trial, so it can’t prove causation, but it can generate the hypothesis I mentioned in the paragraph above.

Kubota et al queried over 100,000 elderly Japanese people as to whether or not they had measles and/or mumps as children.

(I well remember having measles myself. I got it in 7th grade in a school I hated. I was absolutely exhilarated to be able to get two weeks off school. I suspect Japanese people have as good a memory as I do (or better), so they probably well remember whether they got measles as kids or not.)

The elderly Japanese were followed for a number of years, and those who remembered having had measles and/or mumps were at “lower risk of mortality from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.”

That’s what I mean about co-evolving with these childhood diseases. Maybe they made us more resilient to other problems as we age. We just don’t know. But the Kubota et al paper is an indication that there might be something there.

I was disappointed in Alex Berenson’s Substack a day or two ago. He wrote that he would insist on his own kids getting the measles vaccine because there was a 1/1000 to 2/1000 risk of death from the measles. I thought he was a better journalist than that.

The measles vaccine was first given in the US in 1963. Prior to that the deaths from measles had declined precipitously, doubtless due to better sanitation and nutrition. The UK kept much better records of deaths from various causes than did the US up until 50 or 60 years ago. The graphic below shows the dramatic decline in deaths from measles in the UK, which didn’t get the vaccine until 1968. The US figures align with these.

In 1962 the CDC reported somewhere between 400 and 500 deaths from measles in the US based on the number of reported cases being ~ 500,000. If you calculate that out, it shows about one death per thousand cases. The problem is that there were vastly more cases of measles than those reported to the CDC. There were millions of cases in 1963. If a kid got the measles, the parents knew what it was. Few parents took their kids with measles to the doctor. If they did, the doc would have said, the kid’s got the measles. Keep him/her home till the spots are gone.

Only really serious cases got reported to the CDC, and of those really serious cases – in kids who had cancer or were immunosuppressed for some reason – probably did die at the rate of 1 per 1,000. But not everyday normal otherwise healthy children.

Alex Berenson could figure this out as easily as I could, so why didn’t he? I have no idea what his motives are, but he’s doing a disservice to his readers for not being more thorough.

Note to this segment. I was just getting ready to post when I discovered the second alleged death from measles in Pennsylvania was ascribed to Amish Lethal Microcephaly, an invariably fatal disease found mainly in Amish babies. This baby had the disorder and tested positive for measles. These babies never live more than a few months, and many don’t even make it out of the hospital after birth. The genetic disease caused the baby’s death. Not the measles.

In any case, the two infants who died would not have benefited from the measles vaccine, which isn’t administered until 18 months of age.

Okay, I just checked my word count so far. It is 2179 words. And that’s just the first pot of the potpourri. Wow! Diarrhea of the keyboard, I guess.

The second one follows the first. Not in number of words, but in context.

Artificial Intelligence and Me

I’ve ended up using AI much more than I thought I would. I never use it to write, but I do use it as a search engine. And I use it to argue with, which is oddly kind of fun.

AI is like an extremely bright friend that likes to argue. The difference is that if you call him on what he says, he doesn’t get pissed. There are no arguments that end up with one side or the other storming off mad. It’s all carried on in a rational way as if emotions are not involved, which on at least one side of the argument is pretty much the case.

I’m going to show those of you who are interested an example.
About a month or so ago, I wanted to find the Kubota et al paper I mentioned above. I had written about it in The Arrow months before, but after that, I had resigned it to my great amorphous pile of digital papers (GAP), as defined by MD. I had forgotten the specifics of the paper. As I remembered it, I thought it was about elderly Japanese people who had been vaccinated vs those who weren’t. Instead of spending a lot of time looking through my GAP, I decided to query Perplexity, my go-to AI.

Here was what I asked:

“I'm looking for a Japanese study comparing comparing Japanese subjects who were vaccinated for measles to those who weren't in terms of disease later in life. Can you help me find the paper? Thanks.”

I just now noticed for the first time that I doubled up on “comparing.”

Perplexity gave me the Kubota et al paper almost instantly. And also corrected me for describing it as a vaccine study. It pointed out that the elderly Japanese were not compared based on vaccination status. Instead they were compared as to whether they remembered getting either the measles or mumps or both when they were children.

I told Perplexity that was exactly the paper I was looking for.

Then Perplexity kind of chided me for even remotely thinking the paper might be used as an argument against vaccination. So we began to argue.

I figured some of you might enjoy an argument with AI. If so, here is the link to the whole thing. I would call it kind of a draw.

Apparently Perplexity thinks I’m a blogger. Probably because I’ve submitted what I’ve written to be checked for typos. It keeps asking me how I’m going to present the argument at various points.

If you do click to read the argument, you’ll get the screen below. Simply click the little X or Close to avoid subscribing, and you can read the whole thing.

Horse Dewormer or Valuable Medicine?

Here is a great video I’ve had up on a tab for a while. It’s Chris Cuomo espousing the virtues of ivermectin, which he is apparently taking, versus his vociferously and relentlessly badmouthing it during the COVID years. The internet never forgets.

How To Rule the World

I read an article about a course at Stanford called How To Rule the World. It’s only available to the chosen. To get in, one must be tapped by former students of the course, then evaluated in a private meeting with the professor.

Theo Baker was tapped as a freshman and had his interview with the prof. But didn’t make the cut to actually get in the class. Instead, he ended up interviewing a lot of people who did take the class and let him in on its secrets.

The book is about life at Stanford and how those who go there are set upon by all the big tech moguls. Money flows freely, and most of the students figure they’ll be billionaires before they’re 25.

Growing up in Washington, DC, the son of two Washington Post reporters, Theo Baker was kind of a coding prodigy in his youth. He got accepted to Stanford and planned to further develop his already vast computer science skills. In looking to make friends, he signed up to be a part of the Stanford University newspaper simply because he had worked on his high school newspaper..

He discovered that compared to others in his class, he wasn’t the coding prodigy he thought he was. And he discovered that he had a real instinct for investigative reporting. Despite both parents being investigative reporters for a major newspaper, he had never given it a thought as a career.

After gaining some notoriety from his first article, he began to look for a second. He heard a rumor about how the president of Stanford – who was a renown neuroscience researcher – might have fudged some of his most famous scientific papers. So as a freshman, Baker set off to investigate the president of his own university. Ballsy kid, he was. What he found out and reported on won him a famous journalistic prize.

He wrote a book about his Stanford experience, his reporting on the president and its outcome, and his switch to journalism. I’ve got to say, the kid is a helluva writer. I bought the book and read it in two days.

In my senior year of medical school, I snared an almost impossible-to-get Stanford clerkship in plastic surgery, which was what I wanted to do at that time. So I spent about a month and a half there, but that was long before personal computers were even a thing. Plus, I spent most of my time in the hospital and the bookstore. So I wasn’t involved in any of the undergraduate activities. But it was a grand place with famous people – in the medical world – everywhere. Quite the heady experience it was.

Whether you want to rule the world or not, I can’t recommend this book enough.

I don’t want to give away what happened, but the former president of Stanford just wrote a rebuttal to the book. In fairness, here is his take.

While on the topic of books…

You Eat Almost a Ton of Food Per Year

For my own internal celebration of our (the US’s) 250th year of independence, I decided to read the three-volume set on the Revolutionary War by Rick Atkinson. He’s written only two of the three planned volumes so far (I’m expecting the third before the end of the year).

The first book in the set, titled The British Are Coming, covers the war from its inception in 1775 to 1777. The other books carry on from there.

I am way, way behind in my goal of reading all three (or even two) this year. I got started late, but am trying to make up the time. I preferentially read books that are congruent with my professional interests, i.e., anthropology, nutrition, medicine, history of diet, etc. These other books take precedence to my pleasure reading, which has fallen way behind.

As mentioned above, I read How To Rule the World in two days. It has some scientific interest in that it is about scientific fraud, which is widespread. But it was also unputdownable, because the kid is such a good writer.

The British Are Coming is also excellent, but I’m taking it in small bites, underlining and taking notes as I go. And it is huge, weighing in at 776 pages. I didn’t realize until I started reading just how much about the Revolutionary War I didn’t know. I’ve read an enormous amount about WWII, slightly less about WWI, a bit about our Civil War, and almost nothing about our own war of independence.

The first volume, which is the only one I’ve been reading, is a real tour de force for a deeply researched history book. It truly reads as a novel, but one filled with tidbits of info I hadn’t a clue about.

For instance, in a small part of a larger paragraph on the almost impossible logistical nightmare facing the British, Admiral Palster wrote Lord Sandwich, “the demands for the small army now in America are so great as to be thought impossible to furnish… What will it take when we have another army there above 20,000 men?”

The author then goes on to say, “If Howe’s host reached 35,000 troops and 4,000 horses later in the year, as anticipated, thirty-seven tons of food and thirty-eight tons of hay and oats would be required every day, almost entirely from Britain.”

This stopped me short. It sounds like a whole lot of food. But dividing 37 tons of food by 35,000 men equals 0.001 tons per man per day. Converting that into pounds, it turns out that each Brit soldier would eat ~ two pounds of food per day. Which got me calculating on how much a human eats in a year. Two pounds of food per day calculates to 730 pounds per year per human. Kind of a jaw-dropping number.

But throughout the book, the author discusses how limited the food was for the British soldiers, so their two pounds per day were less than what the average Brit or American would eat today. I turned to my trusty friend Perplexity to find out the average weight of a day’s food for an average man in the US.

Here was my answer:

I almost couldn’t believe this, so I calculated it on a caloric basis. Fat = 9 kcal/g; carbs = 4 kcal/g; and protein = 4 kcal/g. According to Perplexity, the average caloric intake for a male is 2,093 kcal/day, and the macronutrient percentages are 47% carbohydrate, 15% protein, and 37% fat. Running the calculations shows 0.91 pounds per male per day. But that is simply the weight of the macronutrients. The largest part of food weight-wise is water.

We ourselves are about 72-73 percent water. So is meat. Carb foods are even higher.

If you take this into account in the calculation, then the amount of food a typical American male consumes in a day could easily reach 4 to 5 pounds per day.

At 4 pounds per day, the average male would consume 1,460 pounds of food per year. At 5 pounds per day, it calculates to 1,825 pounds per year.

To me, this is mind boggling. But the numbers don’t lie. I would never have guessed this amount unless I had read the quote above about the pounds per day per British soldier. Made me get my calculator out. At two pounds per day, those poor sods were on starvation rations.

If someone asks you how much you eat in a year, you can confidently reply that you eat over half a ton of food every year. Sometimes more. Had I not done the calculations, I wouldn’t have imagined the annual poundage we all throw back.

Americans Ate Meat. A Lot of It.

I’ve been saving this tab showing American menus from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. These menus were from a time in which refrigeration as we know it today didn’t exist. Ice was the refrigerant, not electricity.

In those days over 100 years ago, meat in some form was the primary choice on just about every menu. Below are a couple of examples.

I hope you enjoy scrolling through this list of menus as much as I have. While you’re scrolling, bear in mind that there was very little obesity in those days. You’ve seen all the old videos from those days. The people looked like stick people compared to today’s populace. Maybe their diets had something to do with it.

Tankers in Hormuz

As you can see from the screenshot from Tanker Tracker taken a few minutes ago, there aren’t many ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Looking at the panel on the right, it looks like virtually all of the tankers in the strait right now are unloaded. So not much oil is passing through irrespective of what anyone tells you.

If you look at the analysis, you can see that traffic through the strait has been minimal except for the few weeks (months) ago during the cease fire.

Sweden Did It Right

The graphic below shows the age mortality rate in deaths per 100,000 over the past few years. As you can see, Sweden is way, way ahead of the curve as compared to the US and California specifically.

Notice the big jump in deaths during the Covid years. Didn’t move a lot in Sweden, the country that basically had a hands-off Covid policy. The Swedes didn’t lock down schools or businesses. Things went on pretty much as normal.

I’ve spent some time in Sweden, but it was years ago. It’s almost always overcast (at least in Stockholm where I was). I’m sure everyone there is vitamin D deficient. And a vitamin D deficiency was one of the alleged issues that made people more susceptible to COVID.

Dr. Anders Tegnell, the State Epidemiologist of the Public Health Agency of Sweden was a lockdown skeptic. As was Dr. Johan Gesecke, a Swedish emeritus epidemiologist, whom I heard in an interview not long after COVID kicked off. He said something I’ll always remember, because it was so unnanny state (and I always thought Sweden was a big nanny state). He said “People are not stupid. If you explain the risks to them, they’ll take care of themselves.”

Compare that to how Fauci, Walensky, Collins, and others in our public health sphere thought about their citizens.

The proof of the pudding is in the graphic below. Take a look at the COVID years.

Cherry Blossoms

I’ve been keeping the tab up on this essay for a couple of weeks. I have a sort of relationship with the author. I have met him a few times, so he may or may not remember me. MD and I’ve also spent some time with his wife before we met him.

He was a major part of Arkansas history while I was in practice there. But not in a good way.

Before I tell you who he is and a bit about him, I’ll just offer up a couple of paragraphs in his essay. The essay is about appreciating the present, and, in my view, and MD’s, it’s pretty profound.

The entire essay is here. It’s not very long, but it is wonderful.

It was written by a guy whose birth name was Michael Wayne Hutchison. He was moved around by parents, step-parents, mother’s boy friends, and picked up names as he went along. He ended up going by the name Damien Echols, and he’s a part of Arkansas history. And, as I said, not a good part.

He was on death row in a pretty brutal Arkansas prison for over 18 years for murders he did not commit.

I’ll give you the briefest of histories.

In 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas, which is a broke-dick little town across the Mississippi from Memphis, Tennessee, three little 8-year-old boys were found brutally murdered. Their bodies were tied down in the bottom of a snaky, muddy creek.

I can’t remember now how it was, but suspicion fell on a 17-year-old kid who wasn’t all there mentally. He was interrogated for hours and hours by the police without a family member or a lawyer present. He denied having anything to do with the crime. Ultimately, he succumbed to the pressure, admitted to the crime, and fingered two other kids. Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols. Both were 18 at the time.

They were arrested on no evidence other than Jessie’s testimony secured unlawfully.

And probably because Damien was kind of weird. He dressed in black and was into heavy metal music and spirituality. Not common in a kid in West Memphis.

There was absolutely no evidence of any kind that any of the three boys were involved in the crime. Two of the three of them were vouched for by their parents as having been at home when the crime was committed.

Damien and Jason were tried together with Crime of the Century style reporting day by day.

Most everyone – me included – figured they were guilty from what was being aired on the media. The jury did, too. They found Jason and Damien guilty of murder. The judge sentenced Jason to life imprisonment and Damien to death by lethal injection. (Jessie was tried separately, and sentenced to what amounted to life in prison.)

A couple of documentary filmmakers offered to help defray the legal expenses of their trial if the boys would agree to it. And agree to allow the filmmakers access to them and their families. Strangely, the judge even allowed them to film the entire trial. Since the outcome was pretty much preordained, I guess the judge wanted to be a star.

The filmmakers went into the entire affair thinking the same thing everyone else was thinking – including me. Based on all the press coverage, the three boys were guilty as sin.

But as the trial wore on and the filmmakers got more and more info, they began to doubt the boys’ guilt. They fairly quickly realized that the trial was a sham and that the three were destined to be crucified.

The boys went off to jail, and everyone pretty much forgot about it.

Then the documentary came out. And a book by an investigative journalist titled The Devil’s Knot. I watched the documentary and read the book and changed my mind.

One part of the documentary told me at least one piece of evidence the police brought to trial was an out-and-out sham. Someone – I can’t remember who now without watching the whole thing over again – claimed that a knife had been used in either the killing or the alleged torturing of the three young boys.

The testimony was that one of the three suspects had thrown the knife into a lake behind Jason Baldwin’s house where they were all hanging out. The sheriff’s department sent out a diver to look for it, and, lo’ and behold, he found it in pretty short order.

I immediately knew this was a setup.

Years before, I had been teaching SCUBA diving in Grand Traverse Peninsula, right outside of Traverse City, Michigan. I was teaching in both a swimming pool and in Lake Michigan, which is pretty clear. At least the part I was teaching in.

As one of my lessons was ending, a couple approached me and asked if I would help them recover the wife’s purse. They had been on a boat on the lake not far from where I was teaching. The husband had goosed the boat, which was a speedboat, and it lurched into the air. His wife’s purse had fallen into the water.

They knew right where it happened and told me if I could find the purse, I could have all the money in it. Which they thought was about fifty dollars. A fairly princely sum for my young self at that time.

I went out on their boat to the spot, dropped a weight down with a rope on it. Then jumped in with my gear and went to the bottom. I attached another line to the weighted rope and started swimming a circle around the vertical rope. It took me about three circles around before I found the purse.

All that was visible above the silt was the clasp. The entire body of the purse was buried.

When I brought it up, it was indeed the purse in question. The husband gave me the two soggy twenties and the one soggy ten for my efforts.

If a purse is almost completely covered with silt in clear Lake Michigan in about an hour, a knife thrown into a murky farm pond in rural Arkansas over a year before would have been completely buried and impossible to find. The diver who went out and found it in short order is full of you know what. It was a plant.

As time passed, DNA evidence began to be used to solve crimes. During a re-investigation there was no DNA from any of the three boys (by which I mean the defendants) found anywhere near the crime scene. There was however, DNA from the step father of one of the murdered kids. Before the three boys got charged, he had been a suspect.

Since no DNA implicated the three imprisoned boys, they asked the judge for an appeal, which he denied. Once that judge was off the bench, somehow these kids, now young men known as The West Memphis Three, were released under what is called an Alford plea, which is rarely granted. In an Alford plea, the criminal admits to guilt, but gets released from prison anyway.

The reason the state offered the three Alford pleas was because if they had undergone a new trial and been found innocent, or if the state had just declared them innocent, the state would have to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars for false imprisonment.

The Alford plea let the men off at no expense to the state. Pretty chickenshit if you ask me.

While Damien was in prison, he got a letter from a young woman who was a landscape architect. She ended up visiting him while he was in prison, and then ultimately marrying him in prison. While she was working for his release, she lived in Little Rock with one of our best friends there. Which is how we got to know her initially and then Damien after he got out in 2013.

They are still happily married and live in New York. Damien has written a few books and has been writing on Substack for a couple of years. He is a different kind of guy, so it’s easy to see why he left West Memphis, and why those in West Memphis were suspicious of him.

If you want to learn more about this awful tale, I suggest you watch the movie Paradise Lost. You can rent it or watch a shortened version here. But the shortened version cuts off just when it starts to get good.

If you want an in-depth account written by an investigative journalist, read The Devil’s Knot.

You can also watch another award-winning documentary titled West of Memphis. When it came out, it was shown at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Damien, Jason, and Lori (Damien’s wife) were in attendance. Since MD and I were the only ones there from Arkansas, we got a lot of special attention and caught up with Lori, whom we hadn’t seen since when she was living with our friends.

At the same event, we met the big, tall guy who was the father of one of the murdered kids. He was featured prominently in Paradise Lost, militating for their executions. But as the evidence became clear, he changed his mind and ended up being one of the many people working for their release.

When you read Damien’s Substack post I excerpted and linked above, you would never imagine it was penned by a man who’d spent over 18 years on death row.

One final point. When I copied one of Damien’s paragraphs above from his Substack and pasted it into the Google doc I write in, I was offered this correction by the brainiacs at Google.

Google requires passing a difficult intelligence test of all its employees. Google has more money than Scrooge McDuck. Yet a guy didn’t graduate from high school, who spent 18 years on death row, and who hasn’t darkened the door of a college knows that a gerund takes the possessive. And the hot shots at Google don’t. Jesus wept.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

This week’s VOTW is a montage of re-colorized videos from the early 1990s. A time before widespread refrigeration. A time when people were dining on the menu items shown above. Take a look at how most people looked then as compared to today. It’s pretty amazing. It sounds like Ronald Reagan narrating the thing, but I couldn’t find his name anywhere in the description. May be AI. Who knows.

Enjoy!

Hmmm. It wouldn’t let me embed the video. You can watch it here.

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

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

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.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Really, thanks. If you got something out of it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t yet. I would really appreciate it.

Finally, don’t forget to take a look at what our kind sponsors have to offer: HLTH Code, Precision Health Reports, and Jaquish Biomedical.

And don’t forget my newest affiliate sponsor Lumen. Highly recommended to determine whether you’re burning fat or burning carbs.