Quiver #3

Greetings all. Here is my latest batch of interesting reads I culled from all the reading I do searching for topics for The Arrow. I hope you enjoy them.

• Robert Hanssen, long incarcerated FBI mole, found dead in his prison cell at age 79. “Mr. Hanssen’s ability to avoid detection was a signal failure of the American intelligence apparatus. His own brother-in-law, who also worked for the F.B.I., reported suspicions about Mr. Hanssen to the bureau a decade before his arrest, but the supervisor he told had dismissed his concerns.” A few years ago I read a terrific book about a young agent who was assigned to work under Robert Hanssen and report on him. This was after Hanssen had come under suspicion, and the agents on his trail wanted someone inside to let them know what was going on. The book was written by the young agent and is the best of all the books I’ve read on Hanssen. During the writing of the book, the author requested permission to visit Hanssen at the maximum security prison in which he was being held. The FBI denied the request, which I found strange.

• Nice list of over 100 logical fallacies. One of my favorites is Deliberate Ignorance: “As described by author and commentator Brian Resnik on Vox.com (2017), this is the fallacy of simply choosing not to listen, ‘tuning out’ or turning off any information, evidence, or arguments that challenge one’s beliefs, ideology, standpoint, or peace of mind, following the popular humorous dictum: ‘Don’t try to confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up!’ This seemingly innocuous fallacy has enabled the most vicious tyrannies and abuses over history, and continues to do so today.”

• Could Ozempic actually be making people fatter? I’ve discussed much of this

  in The Arrow, but this article hits a few important notes I didn’t. “Not nearly enough people are talking about the fact that Ozempic and Wegovy leave patients with a consistent or higher fat percentage than they had before starting the drug. The type of weight that patients lose on Ozempic or Wegovy does not lead them to a healthier body."

  “While before and after photos online may beg to differ, Ozempic and similar semaglutide products are not as effective as they may seem. In fact, a study from the Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics discovered that over two-thirds of participants gained back all the weight they had lost on Ozempic (and more) less than a year after stopping usage of the drug. Additionally, several doctors have been quoted in magazines, on talk shows, etc., confirming that the Ozempic rebound is real. While these semaglutides can be highly effective at making the number on your scale drop while regularly using them, the minute that patients stop taking these medications, their bodies revert back to their previous weight.”

• How to make your arguments stronger (hint: longer is not the answer) Here’s a trick used in pharmaceutical ads: “In one study, two groups of people were shown lists of side effects for the same drug. One group’s list contained both major and minor side effects, while the other group’s list contained just the major side effects. The results: “Individuals who were exposed to both the major side effects as well as the minor side effects rated the drug’s overall severity to be significantly lower than those who were only exposed to the major side effects,” says Sivanathan. “Furthermore, they also showed greater attraction towards consuming this drug.””

• As if you needed more reasons to avoid ultra-processed foods. Not only have highly-processed foods been fingered as causes of an increased risk of diabetes, obesity and even cancer, now they’ve come under scrutiny as a probable cause of depression, anxiety, and cognitive decline.

• Never forget these 12 times celebrities were the absolute worst during Covid-19 lockdowns. “When it feels like the whole world may be collapsing around you, as though a rug has been pulled from right under your feet, easily one of the least comforting things a person can do is offer patronizing advice. Yet, time and time again, when a massive, timeline-disrupting event happens, celebrities always come out of the woodwork to gift us their “sage” advice, stand in solidarity with our struggles, or wag their fingers at our personal choices.

  “During the Covid-19 “pandemic” lockdowns, celebrities took this to a whole new level. They seem to operate on an entirely different moral high ground from us normal folk. So, lest we ever forget, I rounded up 12 of the most infamous times that global elites were the absolute worst during lockdowns.”

  IMHO, the absolute worst was the 12 celebs creaching their way through the song Imagine. Talk about making one throw up in one’s mouth. Gak.

• Federal judge instructs the FDA to get its rear in gear and release the data used to approve the mRNA vaccines that were neither particularly efficacious nor safe.

  For more than a year, the FDA has resisted efforts to force the release of the data that it used to approve the controversial shots faster than any vaccine in history, claiming it would need as much as 55 or potentially even 75 years to release the roughly 329,000 pages of documents in its possession on the subject.

  The FDA finally agreed to a 223 year period over which they would release the data. The judge said, No. The data in its entirety needs to be made public by the end of June, 2025. If the vaccine were truly as effective and safe as the FDA approval process made it out to be, why wouldn’t they just release the data and be done with it. Instead they had to be dragged into court. Hmmm.

  Maybe it was because their own data showed a significant risk of heart inflammation in vaccinated kids, for whom it was approved. FDA researchers found that vaccinated children aged 12-17 incurred an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. I hope the noose is tightening…

• Is a recession looming? According to Costco’s CFO, you can tell by beef sales. “Costco’s shoppers were less often choosing to purchase beef or steaks from the stores’ meat departments in recent months — a trend indicative of a recession or at least “concern” for a recession, according to CFO Richard Galanti.

  “Galanti, speaking with investors in a third-quarter earnings call last week, said more shoppers were choosing less expensive cuts of meat instead.

  “Historically, we’ve always seen, like within fresh protein, we’ve always seen when there’s a recession, whether it was ’99, ’00 or ’08, ’09, ’10, we would see some sales penetration shift from beef to poultry and pork,” Galanti said in a third-quarter earnings call last week. “We’ve seen some of that now.””

• Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules. Take one small step. Change your mental maps. Struggle is good; scary is good. Instant judgement is bad. Remember the end of your life. Be playful. Be useful to others. Perfectionism = procrastination. Sleep, exercise, eat, chill out. Repeat. Write it all down. You can't get it all from reading.

• If you ship breakables, honeycomb wrap is the bomb. Short video shows how to use it. It’s cheap and works like a charm. I have no involvement, financial or otherwise, with any company that makes it. I just think it’s cool stuff and wanted to pass the info on it along. My birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks, so I figured maybe thousands of people would be sending me gifts, and honeycomb wrap could help out.

• Heavy drinkers lose muscle mass. As you might imagine, when I read this headline I took a big gulp. If you’ve read The Arrow for long, you’ll know what a fanatic I am about maintaining muscle mass, so the thought of one of my favorite pastimes possibly causing me to lose muscle got my attention. Fortunately, the level of my booze consumption doesn’t come close to the amount the study shows causing the loss. Whew! My bride may be in trouble, though.

• Nice map of the main Roman roads. This map shows the extent of the Roman Empire at its peak. I know all about Roman roads as I helped my middle son make a model of one for his high school Latin class. Being the engineer I am, I really got into the construction of it. In doing so, I realized how complex the construction was. If all the roads shown on the map are true Roman roads built in the same way our model was, it was an enormous undertaking. Since the map is titled “main Roman roads,” I suspect they were.

• Terrific article on the Index Mind Set. I liked it so much I read it thrice. After my badgering, MD read it once. She averred it was good. So take that all for what it’s worth. “Very broadly speaking, the index mindset favors average results over extreme ones, a bird-in-hand over two in the bush, relative over particular truth, function over form, quantity over quality, mandate over merit, efficiency over exploration, passivity over action, predictability over tails, determinism over freedom of choice, mistake avoidance over smart decisions, evolution over revolution, adaptation over reformation, safety over risk, diversification over concentration, preservation over creation, velocity over due diligence, optionality over decisiveness, the general over the specific, and growth over profit.” Along with the writing, the article is chock full of great videos.

• Why are so many banks in trouble all of a sudden? Balaji gives a nice explanation via analogy. “…imagine that Apple told Best Buy, Target, and Walmart that it was only going to be selling iPhone 10s for the indefinite future, and sold them billions of dollars worth of phones on the basis of that representation. Then after selling those billions, it turned around and launched the iPhone 11 — suddenly devaluing all the inventory it had just sold, and forcing Best Buy, Target, and Walmart to sell their billions of now-depreciated iPhone 10s for a 10-20% loss…small in percentage terms, but massive when multiplied across that much inventory, especially for something they didn’t expect to take a loss on. Had Apple done this — had it committed to not launching a new phone in writing to its buyers, and then reneged on that promise after dumping billions in old inventory on them, we’d call that fraud. Apple would have sold those assets on false representations, regardless of whether they knew they were going to devalue the assets at the time of sale.

  “Now, Apple probably wouldn’t do that! But that’s what the Treasury and Fed did to their banks in mid-2021. They sold billions of dollars worth of bonds at low interest rates, telling the banks over and over and over again that inflation was transitory and that they wouldn’t hike rates. Banks reluctantly “binged” on those bonds, and then — surprise! — the Fed hiked rates to the moon. And Treasury began selling new bonds with much higher interest rates, like the iPhone 11s in our analogy, thereby devaluing everything the government had just sold.”

• The Destruction of Language as Tool of Power. “Did anyone provide you with a stable and dependable ratio between the growth of so-called cases and hospitalizations and deaths? No they did not, because such calculations either did not exist or if they existed were not made public.

  “Were you told that prior to the Spring of 2020 the term “case” had never been used to refer to people having a positive test result in the absence of physical symptoms as observed by a doctor? Or that the PCR tests being used were being run at 40-45 cycles of amplification when it was known that anything more than 33 cycles (some experts even said 27 cycles) of amplification generated massive amounts of false positives?

  “No, you were simply supposed to “consume” the floating signifier of the “case” and accept the fright-freighted single semantic valence that the media was attaching to it by means of nauseating repetition. And here’s the scary part, most people did exactly that!”

• Go woke, go broke. Is there a more woke city than San Francisco? It has to take the cake, though there are a lot of competitors surging in the race. The largest hotel in San Fran, the 1,921 room Hilton Union Square, has been abandoned by its owners. They’ve simply walked away and left it to the lenders to deal with. If you’ve been to Union Square in SF anytime lately, you’ll know why occupancy is so low. Still, it’s hard to swallow the notion that such a huge investment could simply be abandoned. The sad part of this story is that the owners of the hotel probably didn’t go woke, however, those running the city did. And, consequently, the owners are going went broke.

• America signs global climate agreement to crack down on farming. This is, of course, idiocy cubed, but totally expected from the crowd in charge. “President Joe Biden’s administration has signed a global agreement with 12 other nations to crack down on farming to “save the planet” from “climate change.”

  “The agreement, led by the United States, has been signed by several major cattle and food-producing states including Australia, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Spain.

  “The nations signed onto a commitment to place farmers under new restrictions to reduce emissions of methane gas.” The agreement sounds more symbolic than anything else, so I doubt it will amount to much beyond temporarily placating the climate hardliners.

• Wall Street Journal has a nice article about a new member of the Homo family. “Discoveries from a subterranean cave system in South Africa are prompting paleoanthropologists to rethink what makes us human. New findings reveal a small-brained human relative known as Homo naledi buried its dead and carved symbols on walls inside the system. Both these behaviors were previously associated with our species or the big-brained Neanderthals with which we interbred.”

  

  Strange to think that an early ancestor who lived 241,000 to 335,000 years ago and had a brain the size of an orange (chimpanzee sized) would bury its dead and carve on cave walls.

• Just when you think the climate change crowd has reached peak stupidity, they set a whole new goal post. A recent Financial Times article reports on how the CEO of a private jet company responded to criticism about his company’s jets carbon dioxide emissions. He said one of his company’s customers emits about 2.1 tons of CO2 per year, which he said was the equivalent of three cats. Someone from the audience said that what he really meant was three dogs. The CEO said later he was referring to data published in a book by Mike Berners-Lee, a British academic, called “How Bad are Bananas”. It states that a cat kept as a household pet is responsible for 310kg of carbon emissions per year, and a dog for about 700kg. So, if you have three dogs, you’re responsible for more CO2 release in a year than a private jet. Jesus wept.

• If I bought into all this nonsense, which I do not, I might say that if you wanted to keep three dogs, perhaps you should switch to lab-grown meat to keep your carbon footprint down. But then that would be incorrect, too. A new study shows that lab-grown meat has its own carbon issues. From the abstract: “Interest in animal cell-based meat (ACBM) or cultured meat as a viable environmentally conscious replacement for livestock production has been increasing, however a life cycle assessment for the current production methods of ACBM has not been conducted. A scenario analysis was conducted utilizing the metabolic requirements examined in the TEAs [technoeconomic assessments] of ACBM and a purification factor from the Essential 8™ life cycle assessment was utilized to account for growth medium component processing. The results indicate that the environmental impact of near-term ACBM production is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production. [My bold for emphasis]

• UK sees massive uptick in excess deaths: Experts refuse to admit possible link to COVID vaccines. The thrust of the article is that the misuse of mechanical ventilators caused a huge number of unnecessary deaths in Covid patients. Those deaths created an overblown emergency situation that frightened the populace into uncritically accepting experimental Covid ‘vaccines,’ which now may be a leading cause of illness, disability, and excess deaths. Pretty much the same thing happened in New York here. False reports of hospitals overrun, overworked staff, and no place to stack the large accumulation of bodies. With the same results.

• More climate madness. The Telegraph reports on how the idiocy of the idea in Ireland, “where the government is reportedly looking at plans to cull around 200,000 cows to meet its climate targets” is taking hold in the UK government. What on earth can they be thinking? The answer is: They’re not. They. Are. Not. Thinking. Run them all out.

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