The Arrow #131

Hello everyone.

Greetings from Montecito.

I should never start off this way, because for whatever reason whenever I write the words this issue may be shorter than usual I always end up writing a longer post than usual. But this time I think it really will be shorter.

I am a bit under the weather. I’m sure I came down with RSV a week or so ago and am in the final throes of it. I haven’t been sick since I got Covid back in January 2022, and even then it was for only a day and a half. I had a bit of a sore throat, a slight fever, and was extremely fatigued. But at the day and a half mark, it vanished, and I felt great. This time I have been sick for a week with all kinds of nasty respiratory symptoms that correspond to an RSV infection. It has been 10 times, no, 15 times worse than Covid was. For me, at least.

Not only have I been sick with all kinds of symptoms, the whole thing has put me in a foul mood. And whenever I get in a foul mood, I end up reading a lot of politics, which even makes my mood worse.

So, you’ll have to indulge me if I decide to vent.

Before I do, however, let me do a little wrap up of a few things left hanging.

Lloyds Fiasco

A few people emailed me or commented that I should change the battery in my card reader. I replied that it appeared to be sealed and I feared it would not work if opened. Then another reader wrote that changing the battery allowed his card reader to work. So, I had our exec assistant back in Dallas try to replace the battery, which she did. And got an error message, which means the thing is at least getting power. The card reader is in Dallas, and the new card is, of course, here with me in Montecito. She will overnight the card reader, and I’ll see if it works with the new card. I’ll keep everyone posted.

Tesla Range

A few weeks ago I wrote about how surprised I was on a trip up to Santa Cruz when we got only about 2/3 of the distance we were supposed to get on a full charge on our Tesla.

A reader wrote enlightening me.

I am an avid reader of the Arrow. [My favorite part of the email. :)] I believe you made an error in your logic of why your Tesla gets reduced range when driving long distances. Like you, I am a mechanical engineer. [I was trained as a civil engineer.] The brake regeneration system on the Tesla as well as the Toyota Prius recovers the energy lost when braking via the motor/generator and uses the energy to charge the battery. If you don't have to stop because of driving on the highway, there is no potential energy lost to braking and no potential battery regeneration. The REAL problem is speed. Wind resistance varies as the 3rd power of speed. Hybrids and EVs get maximum range or MPG(e) when running at lower speeds, and at lower speeds there is typically start/stopping where the energy is recovered during braking. You said you were traveling at 78mph. At 55mph you would use (55/78)^3 less energy. I am confident the Testa stated range is computed or tested at a much lower speed than 78mph, and probably lower than 55mpg.

If by chance you were driving into a headwind, even a small one, this would have exacerbated the problem.

I’m ashamed to admit I hadn’t thought of the wind issue. I’m sure my correspondent is correct. I actually hedged a little bit when I wrote 78 mph. Much of the trip was at 85-90 mph. I use Waze even when I know exactly where I’m going as the app alerts me when there are police lurking ahead. And when there are not, I will often put the pedal to the metal, especially if I am running late, as I was that day. So that would have massively increased the wind resistance.

I am reading a great book right now about the art of clear thinking on the fly, so to speak. The book is by a fighter pilot who flies both the F-16 and the F-35 fighter jets. In an early part of the book he describes a mission in which he was charged with testing the maximal performance of the F-16. He had it going at Mach 1.6 when it started to vibrate severely. At that point, he was about to call it quits, but then remembered being told by an experienced F-16 pilot that those jets did get wobbly at Mach 1.6, but if you could push them through that barrier, they would start flying smoothly.

The author’s predicament was that he was worried the plane might start to vibrate so violently that a wing might be torn from the plane. He wrote that there was no ejecting at Mach 1.6, because hitting the air at that airspeed would have turned every bone in his body to jello. His options were to slow down or to speed up. He took the old F-16 pilot at his word and blasted through. After a bit of teeth-chattering vibration, the flight smoothed out, just as predicted.

You don’t think of wind speed being that much of a factor, but it obviously is.

I vividly remember my own close encounter with high wind speed. And it wasn’t anything remotely near Mach 1.6.

When I was 18 and fresh out of high school, my classmate and running buddy Dave and I decided we wanted to be skydivers. We scoped out a place at Lake Elsinore, which is about 50 or so miles from where we lived in the edge of the LA Basin. Since we were under 21, we had to have a consent form signed by one of our parents. Dave had no trouble as his father was a retired Navy pilot. My parents, on the other hand, were adamant about not signing. They feared, as I understand now, that they might be signing my death warrant.

Necessity being the mother of forgery, I signed their names to the consent form. And it worked. But those were other times. Today, I’m sure, it would have to be notarized and all that, and my plan would have been foiled.

Forged document in hand, Dave and I headed for Lake Elsinore, got there about 11 AM, paid our money, and got started. The jump school issued us each a JC Penny military green coverall, a pair of Army surplus combat boots, and an ancient leather helmet like the ones worn by Red Grange.

I shit you not, these were the very helmets. We threw our coveralls on along with our combat boots and helmets and began training.

They showed us how to hit the ground and roll. We jumped off of a structure that was about five feet high on to some soft ground and practiced buckling our knees as we hit and rolling onto our sides to minimize the shock.

Then we went to a mock up of the airplane and worked on exiting the plane. Which was vastly more complicated than simply jumping out the door.

The plane involved was an ancient Howard, which is a tail-dragger, high-wing monoplane probably built in the 1930s or 40s. It had a large opening through which to exit on the right side of the plane. There was a small—about 6 inches by 12 inches—footplate that dropped below the wing strut on that side.

The procedure was that the jump master would get a signal from the pilot that we were nearing the jump zone. The dive master would then point at the next person up to jump. That person would then make his (and in my class it was all guys) way to the big opening and hold on to the sides with both hands. Then, at the proper time, the jump master would scream “stand by,” which was the signal to step out of the plane and put one foot on the little footplate under the strut. We were put through this process countless times on the mock up till we got it right (and after the fact, I understood why).

The process was to always maintain contact at three point. Either two hands and one foot, or two feet and one hand. Strangely, they kept emphasizing this three-points-of-contact business without really telling us why. I’m sure it was a Curse of Knowledge issue. Dave and I, being the macho 18-year olds we were, kept trying to get out fast to show how agile we were, and we ended up letting go with one hand before the one foot was solidly in place. Eventually, we slowed down and got it right, so we could move on.

Over lunch we watched a film reel about all the things that could go wrong during a parachute jump, which, of course, we laughed off with fake bravado. (Given my own teenage years, I don’t know how so many teenagers, boys especially, make it through unscathed.)

We learned how to pack parachutes and how to look for any tells that one may not be packed correctly. We learned how to deploy our emergency chutes that we would be wearing in the front at about waist level.

We then had classwork showing all the different situations we might encounter requiring us to deploy our emergency chutes. And how to deploy them should one of these situations demand. There was a lot of info crammed into about 45 minutes, which occasioned a lot of angst in me, despite my outward derring-do.

I just prayed that if my main chute screwed up, it would be a total failure. In other words, it just wouldn’t open. Then all I would have to do was pull the cord on my emergency chute and hope for the best.

All of the other situations required special treatment of the emergency chute to keep it from getting entangled with the improperly opened main chute. Were that to happen, we were told, we would “Roman candle” down with both chutes unopened trailing behind us in a straight tuber, like a Roman candle. A pleasant mental picture, for sure. And each of the partial failures of the main chute demanded that the emergency chute be dealt with in a particular way.

For example, one of the most likely screw ups to occur with the main chute was what was called a Mae West. In a Mae West situation, as the main chute is trying to open one of the shrouds gets looped over it. Instead of the nice round semi-sphere of the proper parachute open, you have what looks like a giant bra. Since the shroud never gets thrown over exactly in the middle, one side of the bra is larger than the other.

The disparity in size means the parachute rotates as it comes down. If we were unfortunate enough to experience a Mae West, we were told, we would probably survive it. But not without a lot of trauma as the ground hit would be pretty hard. Our instructor told us if we did end up with a Mae West, we were to pull the rip cord on our emergency chute with one hand and hold the parachute in place with the other. Then we were to grab the chute with both hands and throw it downward in the same direction we were turning. In other words, if we Mae Wested it, and we were headed earthward spiraling to the right, we were to throw our emergency chute downward and to the right. If all went according to plan, the chute would fill with air and rise up next to the Mae Wested main chute. If not, it would fly upward, choke out the bit of lift we were getting from Mae, and we would Roman candle. [The bride mentions at this point that a sane person would have said… nah! But not so one buoyed by the bravado of youth and testosterone.]

Every possible partial malfunction had an instruction like this with the ending being if we didn’t do it right, we would Roman candle.

Trying to keep all the various partial malfunctions and their specific remedies straight was difficult. Which is why I prayed that if anything happened it would be a total malfunction where all I had to do was open my emergency chute and scream.

We finish this delightful session and then it’s off to hit a few more practice roll landings and another couple of exits from the mock up. We then put on our main chutes, our emergency chutes, our Red Grange helmets, and, before we know it, we’re taxiing for takeoff sitting on the floor in the back of the Howard.

Two things I haven’t mentioned yet.

First, this is the first time I’ve ever been on an airplane. In those days before airline deregulation, air fares were expensive. The only people who traveled by air were business people and wealthy jet-setters. My dad had made a few business trips on a commercial airliner, but none of our family had ever flown. So, even the flying itself was a new experience for me.

Second, there wasn’t enough training time for us to learn how to navigate down in our parachutes…assuming they opened. Instead we had clunky black radio receivers sitting on top of our emergency chutes. We had tested them before we got on the plane. The plan was for someone on the ground to talk us down. They would say, “turn right,” and we were to pull the right rope hanging down from our chute, which closed off one of the openings in the chute that the air flowed through. The chute would then twist to the right. In that way, they were to guide us down.

I seriously doubt any parachuting school today could get insurance if they did that. But those were different times.

We’re sitting crammed together on the floor in the back of the Howard at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon after having gotten to the school at 11 am. I can’t now remember if Dave went first, or if I did, but whenever it was my turn, the jump master gave me the sign, and I oonched toward the opening. I grabbed the sides of the opening and awaited the signal.

“Stand by!”

I hold on to both sides of the door and keep my left foot glued to the floor—three points of contact—and stick my right leg out to place my foot on the 6”x12” step under the strut.

WHAM!!!!

They had failed to mention the wind speed. The plane was flying at probably 120 mph when I gingerly stuck my leg out. The air slapped my leg back against the side of the plane, almost causing me to lose my grip and fall out. It kind of unnerved me, but I fought the wind and slowly moved my foot onto the step. Then, when firmly footed on the little step, I grabbed the strut first with my right hand, then with my left. It was a huge battle against the wind, which, of course, was why we were trained to always keep three points of contact.

It would have been nice had they told us why, so I might have anticipated the power of the blast of air that hit me when I stepped out.

I got my left foot on the step and the jump master gave me the jump sign. I kicked off with my feet then turned loose with my hands and was falling face first toward the ground.

I received a hellacious jerk as the parachute opened, for which I was grateful. The instructor had warned us the jerk as the chute opened would be pretty severe. It was the sweetest most welcome severe jerk I had ever received at that point in my life.

As instructed, the first thing I did was to examine the chute to make sure it had opened properly and all the pull lines for directional control were reachable. Everything was copacetic.

No partial failures, thank God. No roman candle in my immediate future.

And the radio worked. I followed the instructions of the guy’s crackly voice coming though and landed on target.

After hitting the ground and rolling, which was nothing, I gathered in my parachute and was absolutely exhilarated. Words can’t describe how I felt. It was the rush to end all rushes. I had cheated death.

A van picked us up and hauled us back to the airfield. The Howard had landed by then, so I went to look at it. My foot had hit the side so hard I was worried I might have damaged it. Upon examination, I found that a metal plate, with plenty of dents and shoe polish stains, had been attached to the side of the plane right where my foot hit, which led me to believe I wasn’t the first.

It made me realize how much force the wind exerts at 120 mph.

A lesson I had forgotten when I was complaining about the reduction in range of my Tesla.

On a sad note…I remembered my instructor well. His name was George Speakman. A few months after my first jump with him, George did a tandem jump with the hugely popular nighttime tv host Johnny Carson. The show filmed the jump and George was on the show. (I unsuccessfully tried to find the episode on YouTube - if anyone can come up with it, I would appreciate it if you would send it my way). Thinking about George while writing this section, I decided to google him. As it turns out, George had a varied career and ended up in Michigan. He decided at age 76 after thousands of jumps to re-qualify for skydiving and was killed when his parachute did not open.

I noticed in his obituary that his wife had died a month and a half before. According to a note his apparent ex-wife sent to some of their joint friends, their daughter told her he had failed to pull his ripcord. I’m wondering if it was on purpose. Or, maybe, given how much adrenaline I had pumping when I jumped, maybe he stroked out. Who knows?

Anyway, a sad story.

New Platform?

I just discovered a new platform that I’ll probably be migrating The Arrow to. It has all the advantages I had to give up when I moved away from my previous platform to come to Substack and will do everything Substack does as well. I’ll have much more flexibility in what I can do and how the newsletter looks. Instead of having it look like all the other Substack newsletters, I can make it look the way I want.

Plus, it will have a search function, so if there is a particular topic you read about two months ago, instead of having to scroll through three or four issues to find what you want, you can simply search.

And, I’m hoping the folks at this other platform aren’t feuding with Twitter, so I can embed tweets like I used to be able to do here. I’m also hoping other video platforms—Rumble, for one—can be embedded. Fingers crossed.

Best of all, it can host all the issues of The Arrow I wrote before moving to Substack, so all those will be available. Substack could not migrate those from my previous provider.

There are too many bells and whistles to list at this point, but suffice it to say, it will be better for you and for me. For all of you who are paid subscribers, you won’t have to do anything. That will all follow along as if there had been no change. In fact, those of you who are paid subscribers will get a bonus.

The only thing keeping me from making this switch right now is that my tech guy is heading off on a cruise with his family. I don’t want to do anything without him at the ready, so I’m holding off till he gets back.

The one other thing I want to assure myself of is that the new provider won’t balk at anything I write. Substack is great in that despite terrific outside pressure the owners haven’t buckled and run anyone off who writes on issues unpopular to the mainstream media, social media, or our leaders in Washington. I want to be assured the new platform won’t buckle either after I’ve gone through all the brain damage to make the transfer.

They Can So Easily Fix This; Why Don’t They?

I have a friend in Portland, Oregon named Nancy Rommelmann. She’s more like an acquaintance than a friend, but she did ply me with coffee one morning at her husband’s coffee shop years ago. Nancy is a helluva writer. She’s written books as well as pieces for all the major papers in the country. Plus, she wrote a blog I read for years. One of my friends knows her well, and when MD and I were headed to Portland ten years or so ago, I knew Nancy lived there, so asked this friend for an introduction. For some reason I can’t recall, MD had to stay at whatever event we were there for, so I slipped away and met Nancy for coffee.

We had a lovely chat, the coffee was fab, and we’ve emailed back and forth a few times since. And we follow one another on Twitter.

A couple of days ago she posted a long thread on Twitter about the downfall of Portland.

Someone printed it on Thread Reader, which is how I’ll reproduce it below.

Here is the Twitter link if you would prefer to read it there.

Portland is was a gorgeous city, and it has come to this.

All the people have to do to fix it is to vote for the right people. I’m sure few people living there enjoy the squalor, crime, homelessness, shit on the streets, open drug dealing and all the rest. So why don’t they vote for people who will clean it up instead of those who maintain the status quo, wringing their hands all the while?

I’ve always wondered why they don’t just throw the bastards out and vote in true reformers.

I just read a couple of pieces in the last few days that basically explained why.

The first was a long article by Morgan Housel, one of my favorite commentators on economics and the human condition. This particular piece, from a little over a year ago, titled “How People Think,” describes “17 of what [Housel] think[s] are the most common and influential aspects of how people think.”

The very first one on this list is this one.

1. Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.

Tribes are everywhere – countries, states, parties, companies, industries, departments, investment styles, economic philosophies, religions, families, schools, majors, credentials, even sports teams. Everyone loves their tribe because there’s comfort in knowing other people who understand your background and share your goals.

But tribes have their own rules, beliefs, and ideas. Some of them you might disagree with; some are even abjectly terrible. Yet they remain supported because no one wants to risk being shunned by a tribe that’s become part of their identity. So people either willingly nod along with bad ideas, or become blinded by tribal loyalty at how bad the ideas are to begin with. [Bold emphasis in the original.]

Take a look at that last sentence.

So people either willingly nod along with bad ideas, or become blinded by tribal loyalty at how bad the ideas are to begin with.

The tribe in Portland is liberal. Liberals are, almost always, Democrats. All the Democrats who run in Portland try to out liberal one another.

The city of Portland will get worse and worse as long as Democrats keep getting elected. But it’s part of the zeitgeist in Portland to be a Democrat. That’s the tribe. It would be unthinkable to vote for a Republican. So, unless a Democrat comes along who is pro-police and has the balls to get in there and clean the place up, it is going to get worse and worse. And if there were such a Democrat, he/she would be a Republican.

Let’s take a look at the situation in New York.

After a succession of ever worsening mayors, New York City was the pits. This was back in the late 80s and early 90s when MD and I used to spend a ton of time in NYC, because that’s where all the major publishers are. We had—still have, in fact—a lot of friends there and contemplated getting an apartment there ourselves because we enjoyed the art, the museums, the books, the music, the plays, the food, all the ‘cultcha’. We saw the transformation that took place after Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. It was impressive.

Before I get into it, I feel compelled to tell you I’m not a real fan of Rudy’s. I thought he was overzealous as the US Attorney for the Southern District. And not only overzealous, but kind of grandstanding overzealous. In my view, it wasn’t the criminality he went after, but the How-many-headlines-will-this-garner-me types of prosecutions. He shone during 9/11, but I loathe what he has become since he left the mayor’s job in early 2001. He peaked as mayor. In my view, at any rate.

As I said, MD and I had many friends in NYC, most of them liberal to the core. And some of those friends voted for Giuliani in his successful run for a second term, because of how he cleaned up the city.

He did it incrementally starting with little things that improved the lives of the folks living there. He painted squares on all the intersections and put up signs saying “Don’t block the box.” Traffic under the best of conditions in NYC is horrific, and there is nothing that frays nerves more than being snarled in traffic (at least for me). And in NYC, you are always in traffic.

When people would come to an intersection and the light would start to change, they would dart into the middle of the intersection and stay there waiting for the traffic in front of them to move. It would take a while. During the time they were there, the people driving the opposite way on the cross street couldn’t enter the intersection. So they would do what all New Yorkers do when they’re pissed off in traffic. They laid on their horns.

Then when the cars finally moved, the traffic going the other way did the same thing. As the light changed, cars would shoot through and block the intersection, causing the drivers coming the other way to lay on their horns.

Consequently, New York was always a cacophony of honking. At all hours of the day and night.

Rudy’s team drew the box and started giving tickets with hefty fines for people who blocked the box. It didn’t take long before traffic started moving much more smoothly. Which made everyone’s life easier.

Then his administration started giving tickets for honking unnecessarily. New Yorkers laid on their horns for everything. Once a few got hefty tickets, that stopped, too. And made the place much quieter and more peaceful for everyone.

Giuliani started arresting and prosecuting people who jumped the subway stiles. And he cleaned up the subway cars and stations. His team famously painted over all the graffiti that used to get sprayed on the subway cars every night. Once the rogue painters realized their efforts were going for naught, they quit spray painting the cars.

The police cracked down on panhandlers and crazy people. Getting rid of them in the one case, and treating them in the second. (BTW, if you ever run into MD at a low-carb meeting or whatever, ask her about my interaction with a panhandler at a street fair in NYC, before the days of Giuliani. She can tell you the tale. She was mortified.)

These are just a few of the small, incremental changes the Giuliani administration made over time. Before long, property values began to rise. Crime fell off, panhandlers disappeared, the city boomed.

When Giuliani’s second term was up and Bloomberg took over, the city began to slowly return to dust. Bloomberg was more of a school marm than he was a mayor. His interests were more in line with micromanaging the diets of New Yorkers. He tried to get rid of supersized drinks and passed laws requiring restaurants to show calorie counts of all their menu items. He wasn’t particularly interested in making the city work.

Then came DiBlasio, who was a total and complete disaster. But no one would vote him out for a second term, because of tribal allegiance. Then when his disastrous second term was over, and he was term limited out, one of the choices was Eric Adams, who was a 20 year police veteran. He promised to be tough on crime, and since he was a Democrat, New Yorkers felt okay voting for him, and voted him in by a fairly large margin.

He’s been terrible.

So, why do people vote against their best interests? That’s always intrigued me.

I got some insight in a recent Substack by Arnold Kling. Kling is an MIT-trained economist I have followed for over twenty years. He comes to things from a little different perspective than most economists, and I have profited from reading him. He had a post a couple of days ago on this very subject that has clarified things for me.

He doesn’t think it’s as much tribal allegiance as he does the influence of role models. I had never thought of it in those terms, and I’m not sure he’s totally correct. I love to be confronted with new ways of thinking about something that I hadn’t considered, so I’m going to pass it along. You can read Kling’s entire piece here, but I’m going to quote a lot of it.

He starts with

I believe that people obtain their political preferences from role models. That is, there are people you wish to emulate and gain approval from, and you adapt your political beliefs to align with those people.

Samuel J. Abrams reports on a recent survey of Jewish Americans that found that almost three-fourths prefer President Biden to former President Trump. This may seem a bit odd, given that President Trump’s foreign policy is considered more favorable to Israel and President Biden strongly supports affirmative action, which tends to work against Jews.

Abrams explains the result as follows:

“Large numbers of Jews believe that abortion (26 percent), climate change (25 percent), and gun-related issues (24 percent) are hugely important to them come November 2024. It is noteworthy that Jewish voters under 40 consider climate change as the top issue for 2024 (40 percent) and this aligns with younger Americans who are appreciably more worried about the environment than their older generational counterparts.

“Nonetheless, the issues that Jews are worried about come 2024 are not particularly salient to Americans. Based on the Gallup poll, even after the Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision, just 2 percent of Americans state that abortion is the most important issue facing the nation and 5 percent feel the same way for guns and gun control. Climate change only picks up 2 percent among Americans as well. While these questions are not perfectly identical, Americans are generally far more worried about immigration policy, crime and violence, a broken judicial system, and issues related to race relations and racism than issues of the environment and abortion.”

Kling goes on to describe why he doesn’t completely buy Abrams’s explanation.

Abrams is using a naive model to explain Jews’ preference for Mr. Biden. In the naive model, they started with a set of beliefs about issues and a ranking of the importance of those issues. They then proceeded to select the candidate whose views on the issues they considered most important aligned best with their own.

A cynical model is that people align tribally with a party. Its leaders then tell them what to believe.

According to Kling, I’ve been going with the cynical, or tribal, model to explain things. He says there is a third model.

I have a third model, which is that people decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. In the case of politics, that means what I call role models. People adapt their views on issues in order to minimize dissonance relative to their role models. It used to be that role models came mostly from your intimate world—friends, families, co-workers. But in the age of electronic communications, people may obtain remote role models.

For many Jews, their role models are people in high-status cultural positions who are inclined to hate Mr. Trump and prefer Mr. Biden. These role models make Jews want to feel comfortable supporting Mr. Biden. The easiest path to supporting him is to put an emphasis on the issues of abortion and climate, where they are inclined to agree with him, rather than on the issues of support for Israel and affirmative action. If they focused a lot on the latter, they might find themselves disagreeing with Biden, which would mean having to depart from their role models.

I have observed this in conversation with friends who are Democrats, both Jews and non-Jews alike. That is, they have become very passionate about the issues of climate and abortion, where they feel comfortable with where the Democrats stand. They are much less inclined to get into the issues of crime or inflation, where they might feel less comfortable about where Democrats stand.

In short, I am saying that Jews’ inclination to view climate and abortion as important issues is caused by their desire to rationalize their support for President Biden, rather than the causality running the other way. The causal model that I have in mind—for everyone, not just Jews—is that we have a small set of people who we wish to emulate and get approval from, and we adapt our political preferences to align with those people. [Bold emphasis in the original]

I think this is interesting, but I’m not sure it applies to everyone. As I’ve always said, tell me what someone thinks about abortion, gun control, and climate change, and I can pretty much tell you what that person thinks about everything else with a political bent. In my view, that’s more tribal than it is role model.

Of course, I suppose many possible role models have the same set of beliefs.

I would prefer that everyone have what Kling refers to as the “naive model.” We’re all individuals, so we have doubtless come to independent conclusions about all kinds of things. One would think people would create (at least in their minds) a list of beliefs they hold about all kinds of things. Then rank these beliefs in some kind of weighted fashion with the most important (to the ranker) weighted the most heavily. And so on down the list.

Then, in a critically-thinking world, the person making the list would compare all the candidates for office against this weighted list and pick the one who compares best. Which is why I think the list must be weighted. It’s not just numbers 1-10. So if one candidate checks 7 of your boxes and the others only check 6 or fewer, you go with the one who checked 7. But the number one item on your list may be the most important to you by a long shot, and the candidate who only hits that one might be your preferred candidate over the one who hits the other 9, but not the first.

That’s the reasonable thinking person’s way of selecting a candidate. At least IMHO.

But most people don’t do that.

They select a tribe. Or, more likely, they’re already a member of a tribe. And they accept the tribe’s beliefs, which in many cases makes them vote against their own best interests. (See the thread about Portland above.)

I do think some of it probably has to do with role models. As Kling writes

When I was in college, at Swarthmore of all places, my main role model was Professor Bernard Saffran, who was center-right. I do not think that college students today are likely to have such an opportunity. Centrists and even old-style liberals are rapidly aging out of the system.

I conceived the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project as a way of trying to elevate the status of intellectuals who use a rigorous thought process, regardless of where they land politically. I hope that somebody comes up with a way to achieve that goal.

As it is, we are stuck in a bad equilibrium in terms of who becomes an influential role model. As someone to the right of center, I see progressive role models as frequently mistaken. As someone with strong views about what constitutes intellectual rigor, I see academic role models as falling horribly short.

FYI, Kling’s Fantasy Intellectual Team mentioned above is used as a category for his posts. If you’re a reader of his, you’ll notice FIT as the category for his posts about some individual who performed a specific feat of critical thinking about some subject.

It should be comforting to know that we can vote ourselves out of almost any mess. But we’ve got to do it.

Okay, I said this was going to be an abbreviated post. I just checked, and it’s already at 6,000+ words and I haven’t even gotten to what I wanted to write about this week.

I’m going to finish out with a list of links and videos with minimal descriptions.

When next week rolls around, I should be over this cold I’m dealing with and totally back in the saddle. All I’ve felt like doing this week is trolling through the net collecting stuff I felt too crappy to write about, so I’ll give you the links.

Carbs, Calories, or Something Else?

This is one I intended to write about last week, but ran out of time. My brain is too fried this week to do it justice, so I’ll hold off till next week.

I’m in an academic low-carb email group, and a couple of weeks ago, one of the members posted a paper I read years ago and hadn’t thought about in a while.

Here is the full-text link for those of you who would like to read it in advance of next week’s in depth discussion. It’s an important paper describing a clever study in which the researchers were trying to tease out what brings about the positive lipid changes most of us have experienced as a result of cutting carbs.

Some people say it’s because low-carb is often also low-calorie. So it’s simply a matter of cutting calories. Others say the positive results are a function of weight loss, not the carb cutting. The researchers devised a clever means to sort this all out. Next week, I’ll present my own views, which don’t quite comport with the researchers.

Fauci Decries Misinformation

Strangely enough this is the longest dialogue I’ve ever listened to from Anthony Fauci in which he doesn’t tell a single lie or promote his own misinformation. Or, even worse, disinformation.

Problem is, as you’ll immediately recognize when you listen to it, the misinformation and disinformation he’s talking about is not his own, but is the truth that those he tried to cancel brought to light.

A creepy, yet fascinating, little speech.

What a putz!

A New Weight-Loss Kid on the Block

What with the enormous profits piling up from Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, the race is on in Big Pharma to keep cranking bigger and better drugs out.

Here’s what Medscape has to say about the lastest one going through the process and sure to be approved:

Survodutide, a dual glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) and glucagon receptor agonist, led to "striking" weight loss in a phase 2 dosing trial in people with overweight/ obesity but without type 2 diabetes.

Close to 40% of people who were taking the highest dose lost 20% or more of their starting weight at 46 weeks, Carel Le Roux, MBChB, PhD, reported at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) 83rd Scientific Sessions.

The other drugs I mentioned above are all simply GLP-1 agonists. Survodutide (that’s the generic—who knows what it will be called when it’s approved? Something with an X or Z or some other good crisp ‘Velcro’ consonant that makes it stick in your mind) is both a GLP-1 agonist AND a glucagon receptor agonist, which means it will stimulate the same kind of fat burning process glucagon does.

…in the group of patients with a planned weekly dose of 4.8 mg survodutide, 83%, 69%, and 55% attained weight loss of ≥ 5%, ≥ 10%, and ≥ 15%  of their initial weight, respectively, at 46 weeks.

In the group of patients with an actual weekly dose of 4.8 mg survodutide, 98%, 82%, and 67% attained weight loss of ≥ 5%, ≥ 10%, and ≥ 15% of their initial weight, respectively, at 46 weeks.

Moreover, 33% of patients in the group with a planned weekly dose of 4.8 mg survodutide and 38% of patients with an actual weekly dose of 4.8 mg survodutide lost ≥ 20% of their baseline body weight by week 46. [My bold emphasis]

Big Pharma is getting clever about reporting the results of weight loss studies.

In days past, researchers typically reported weight loss as the mean (average) weight loss of the group of subjects on the study drug. If they released the data you would see results all over the place. Some subjects wouldn’t lose much at all, while some lost enormous amounts of weight. The rest were spread out in between. The mean weight loss was usually small compared to that experienced by the subjects who lost the most. So small, in fact, that it wasn’t particularly impressive.

Now they’re presenting the data as above. Segmented, as in 38 percent of patients lost ≥ 20 percent of their body weight. People who are desperate to lose weight tend to indulge in magical thinking and will be sure they will be in this group and lose 20 percent of their body weight, when the truth is 62 percent of the subjects did not.

People may lose a little more a little more quickly on survodutide or whatever it will ultimately be named. But, just like the others, they will regain it just as quickly when they discontinue the drug.

They will lose muscle mass as a part of the weight they lose, which will make them even more obese when they regain their lost weight. And make it much more difficult to lose it again.

Speaking of muscle mass…

Build Muscle While You Sleep

I just ran across a paper from the Netherlands from a few years ago discussing how a bolus of protein before hitting the rack at bedtime can increase muscle synthesis.

It’s one of these studies that seem to come out of Europe all the time. I don’t know if they can’t get funding like scientists can in the US or what, but many researchers in Europe (especially Italy) publish papers like this one after another. They always have sexy titles and always seem to get referenced. But they are not original research.

The authors comb the medical literature for papers on a given topic. They read them—one assumes (hopes)—then summarize the conclusions of other people’s research.

Apparently, these folks found papers showing that taking a bolus of protein before bed increases muscle synthesis during sleep. Which, if true, would be nice to know.

The problem with these studies is that you have to a) read the review study itself, then b) read all the papers referenced to see how accurately the authors of the review paper interpret them.

I have done only the a) part on this paper due to my fight with the RSV. So, at this point I can only assume they’ve represented the referenced studies accurately and if so it looks like you could take a bolus of protein before bed and build more muscle. But as I say, I’ve personally only done the a) step. Buyer beware.

It would be nice, though…

Top US Official Admits to Using Private Email to Avoid FOIA

When I was in engineering school, we had a half-credit course on engineering careers. One day the lecture was on the difference between working for the private sector and the public sector.

Basically, back then at least, it boiled down to the difference of sure job stability versus income. Those in the private sector made more money, but they had less job security. If you chose the working-for-the-government route, you didn’t make as much money, but you had great job security.

All that has changed now. If you work for the private sector, you don’t make all that much money, but you still have lousy job security. If you can pull down a government gig, you make oodles of bucks and you have great job security. The only downside is that everything you do is transparent. All your screw ups and triumphs are available for public scrutiny.

Now comes this swine from the NIH—a top advisor to Anthony Fauci, no less—who tells other scientists to use his personal email instead of his NIH email so the correspondence can’t be accessed via a FOIA request.

I would say this is probably okay if one of your friends is trying to set you up with a hot date, but not okay if the email is government business being paid for by Joe Q. Public.

“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.”

After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

No bueno.

But, since one of the perks of being on the government teat is job security, I doubt much happened.

Star Spangled Banner

Since I was laid low on the 4th of July, about the best I could do was surf the net. I came across all kinds of performances of the national anthem, but this one was unique. For your listening—and watching—pleasure…

Saturated Fat…Again

I got emails from a handful of people alerting me to Nina Teicholz’s Substack piece about the Washington Post opinion columnist who wrote disparaging saturated fat. I read the piece by Tamar Haspal when it came out almost a month ago, and I had it queued up to write about in The Arrow. But I kept running out of time.

It’s probably a good thing, as Nina wrote a much more comprehensive take down of the article than I would have. And she was much nicer about it than I would have been. I have little patience with idiots like this and would have given her short shrift.

Here is the ignorant column in full from the Washington Post.

And here is Nina’s critique:

Canceling the Science on Saturated Fats

I’ll have more on the malignant Tamar Haspal in a future issue of The Arrow.

Video of the Week

A few days ago my friend Tom Naughton sent me the fruits of his creation in his video studio. It’s brilliant. I wish I were smart enough, clever enough, and creative enough to gin up stuff like this.

Enjoy!

Well, as Porky Pig used to say at end of cartoons, that’s all folks. Next week, once I’m fully and completely over RSV, I’ll focus more on nutrition. Thanks for hanging in there and indulging me.

Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

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