The Arrow #162

Hello everyone.

Greetings from Dallas.

Instead of my normal whining about the weather, which has been gorgeous for the past few days, I’ll put up this tweet I reposted on my X account. We dodged a bullet by not being in California right now.

SOURCE

Calley Means, Ozempic, and Tucker

A few days ago, Tucker had a long interview with Calley Means about the state of healthcare in the US with emphasis on how Big Pharma controls just about everything. And we’re all the worse for it.

The interview is a little over 40 minutes long and has made it from X (I’m officially ditching the seemingly obligatory “formerly known as Twitter” from now on—this will be the last time you see it.) to YouTube. I’m not sure how long it will stay up on YouTube, so I’ll link to the version on X below in case it vanishes. I doubt it will vanish, though, since it won’t vanish from X. Therefore, all YouTube would be doing is losing ad revenue in a lost cause. In the old days, YouTube, Google, Facebook, and Twitter would have all refused to carry it.

X link to full video just in case.

The interview is a rehash of many of the same topics I’ve discussed in The Arrow over the past year or so, including the fact that the price for taking care of people with diabetes in the United States approaches the defense budget.

Calley Means, Tucker’s interviewee, is the brother of Dr. Casey Means, whom I wrote about here a few weeks ago.

He discusses how Novo Nordisk, now the largest company in Europe, has plans for almost exponential growth because of the expected rise in obesity in the United States, its largest market. He also noted that Ozempic and others are not approved in Europe for weight loss, so the massive growth—both current and planned—is all expected to come from expanding US waistlines. Which is pretty pitiful.

Means also mentioned that the NAACP was a lobbyist for Novo Nordisk. He said it was on their website. Since obesity is a slightly larger problem for black people than it is for white people, the NAACP is trying to make the case that the denial of coverage by the government for Ozempic and other such drugs has racist overtones. I went to the NAACP website and spent about 30 minutes there searching every link available, and there was no mention of Ozempic, Novo Nordisk, or anything related.

So, I went to Google, and, although I didn’t find a record confirming the NAACP was a registered lobbyist for Novo Nordisk, I did find plenty of information that they were working together.

I suspect the NAACP scrubbed their site (probably at Novo Nordisk’s suggestion) after the Tucker video.

Given the number of obese and overweight people in the United States, and given that Wegovy/Ozempic costs ~$1,000+ per month, the total cost of the government underwriting these drugs would be enormous. Vastly more than the defense budget. All insurance premiums would skyrocket and doubtless taxes, too. It would be a financial disaster for the country.

And worst of all, it would be for naught.

All these drugs do is create medically-induced anorexia. They make those who take them not hungry, and do so by slowing the transit of food in the gut—and sometimes, perhaps by stopping gastric motility almost completely. And without getting into all of the other side effects, which are substantial, just the medically-induced anorexia is problematic.

It’s been shown countless times that when people go on calorically-restricted diets, they typically lose muscle mass. When they go off the calorically-restricted diets because they have reached a goal weight, or just because they’re tired of them, they regain most of the lost weight. But they gain more fat than muscle, meaning they wind up fatter than they were in the first place. So they end up weighing just as much as they did before, but with a lower lean body mass. Which is no bueno, to say the least.

This is precisely what the studies show—if you read the small print in the supplementary material. A little less than half the weight loss is from lean body mass.

No one knows what the long-term side effects might be in people who stay on these drugs for more than 68 weeks. That’s as long as they’ve been studied. The push by Novo Nordisk is to keep people on these drugs for life.

Their argument is that obesity is a chronic disease, just like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol. Everyone knows, they posit, that people with these other chronic diseases need to stay on medication for life, so the same should hold for an anti-obesity drug. That’s the pitch to get insurance to cover it.

It seems to make sense on the surface, but it doesn’t really. Why not? As I said, these drugs have never been tested beyond 68 weeks. Who knows what will happen after that? I suspect people will start gaining their lost weight back after they re-equilibrate at some point. No one knows what that point will be. Let’s say it’s two years. Or even three years. Then the lost weight starts coming back on, and the government and insurance companies have forked over ~$15,000 per year for two or three years for God only knows how many people. And with nothing to show for it other than a population of people who have less lean body mass and greater fat mass than when they started.

So, in essence, all the funds for those two or three years of payments times the millions of people who would opt for it if it were free would be transferred from the pockets of other US citizens to Novo Nordisk and other such companies. Those who pay insurance premiums would help tote the note, and those who pay taxes would, too. Sounds like a helluva deal for Novo Nordisk and a disastrous one for everyone else. Including those who got the drugs. We all end up out of pocket—they end up with less muscle mass and more fat. Talk about a lose-lose.

In the pages of The Arrow over the last year or so, I’ve discussed most of what the Tucker interview covered. It’s a nightmare scenario for all involved except for the drug companies. Even if you’ve read every word of The Arrow since its inception—and if you have, my sincerest thanks—I would still encourage you to watch the Tucker interview simply because it’s all there in one place.

One thing I did not know and that I learned from the interview is how Big Pharma controls the news with its massive advertising spending. It’s not really to make people aware of the drugs or to encourage them to ask their doctors for them—they’ve already gotten the doctors on board—it’s to have a thumb screw on the media.

Because this short segment of the interview is so important, I’ve sliced it out of the overall talk and posted it below. As I say, I had no idea. If I had thought about it, I would probably have figured it out. But I hadn’t thought about it.

It explains a lot, though.

You can now see why the entire mainstream media was so on board with all the Covid nonsense.

Speaking of Covid nonsense…

Can the CDC Ever Be Trusted Again?

This one truly beggars belief.

According to investigative reporter Paul Thacker, the CDC’s own experts advised that masks were useless against Covid, but the poobahs running the agency refused to believe.

It’s an incredible story.

Last summer one of the CDC’s experts gave a talk during which she presented evidence that N95 respirators were no better than cloth or paper masks at preventing the transmission of Covid. In other words, they didn’t work at all.

Remember the mosquito and the chain link fence analogy? If you put ten chain link fences around your property, mosquitos could get through just as easily as if you had only one chain link fence. Same with masks and viruses.

The CDC didn’t like the data their own scientist came up with, so they had other CDC scientists do a systematic review of all the data on masks. The scientists doing the review came to the same conclusion: Masks don’t work to prevent Covid.

The CDC put the systematic review up on their website in draft form, but still insist the “science” is wrong in their systematic review.

According to Thacker,

[The CDC] want[s] the experts to write guidelines that recommends healthy people wear masks, even though research shows masks won’t really stop healthy people from getting sick.

He goes on to point out

The CDC’s request for experts to redo their work raises obvious questions: Why does the CDC gather outside experts to provide advice, if the CDC then demands advice they already want?

Even more important, Why is the CDC pushing masks after the CDC published a May 2020 policy review in the CDC’s very own journal “Emerging Infectious Diseases” that did not find a “substantial effect” for masks stopping transmission of respiratory viruses?

The reason seems obvious. The CDC has caught the “masks work” political wave and is now demanding that independent experts conform to their preferred mask dictates.

Politico first reported that the CDC’s advisors released and voted to approve their draft guidance last November, updating the agency’s 16-year old recommendations on controlling infectious diseases in healthcare settings.

“But some health workers aren’t happy about this,” Politico noted. “During the meeting’s public comment period, patients and providers called for masks to be worn in health care settings.”

It isn’t science; it’s politics.

Thacker’s Substack is usually behind a paywall, but not this one. It makes for an interesting read. Especially when you can see the CDC is as political as the rest. And this is the agency we rely on for health guidance.

Here is Thacker’s piece in its entirety.

INVESTIGATION: CDC Upset Their Own Expert Advisers Not Recommending Masks, Demands They Recommend Masks

And here is his Substack from today in which he fishes for whistleblowers. I love the graphic at the top. It portrays the situation perfectly.

CDC Warns CDC’s Own Scientists That Their Finding on Masks “Is Not Scientifically Correct”

Now that you know not to trust Big Pharma and the CDC, let’s look at the best way to lose weight and maintain that weight loss.

Best Way to Lose Weight

I’m sure this is going to be a letdown for most readers, but the best way to lose weight and keep it off is with some version of a low-carb diet. Could be keto, could be carnivore, could be some kind of fasting or time-delayed eating. And it can be done with a low-calorie diet, but one high in protein.

I know, I know, there is nothing magic here. It just requires stick-to-it-ness.

I’m pretty sure just about every reader of this newsletter has done something requiring a lot of deprivation and perseverance. Whether it’s getting a college degree, being in the military, excelling in a job, surviving all of the many slings and arrows life throws at you, just about all of us have had to put our noses to the grindstone multiple times to get something important done.

Yet so many people—myself included—lose our will power when it comes to diet.

It is true that it is more difficult now than it was in the past to stay slim. For reasons I’ll get into in a bit.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s when I was a kid, everyone I knew ate a bowl or two or three (in my case) of some sort of dry breakfast cereal with several spoonfuls of sugar sprinkled on it for breakfast. Bread was ubiquitous. It was on every table at every meal all over America. Potatoes were a staple. As was macaroni and other types of pasta. We all ate a lot of carbs then, and obesity was a fraction of what it is today.

One of the confounders in this then-vs-now obesity equation is smoking. Back then most adults smoked, which is a known way to keep weight in check. But kids did not smoke. And childhood obesity then was almost non-existent. Every classroom had maybe one overweight kid in it. One of my classrooms had zero overweight kids. I know because we all had to weigh for a science experiment.

I always love to show this photo because it demonstrates what I’m talking about.

If you look at this photo of a bunch of kids at a birthday party in the 1950s in Arkansas, you can see that they’re all thin except for the big kid in the back row on the left. He’s a bit hefty. Which was typical. Maybe one overweight kid and a bunch of thin ones.

I doubt you’ll recognize anyone in this photo. The only girl in the photo is my bride in the lower left, and the overweight kid in the back is Bill Clinton.

As the photo shows, most kids back then were thin, which was normal for kids then. Today, about 50 percent of kids are overweight or obese. They didn’t smoke back then, and they don’t smoke now, so that isn’t a confounder with kids.

What happened between then and now that has driven obesity through the roof?

Did people have more will power then? Or is it something else?

Most physicians in the middle of the 20th century and later attributed obesity to a sensitivity to carbohydrates. Which, knowing the physiology involved, seems to make sense. At least for this small percentage of people who represented the overweight. Obesity rates had held pretty steady over decades, then, suddenly in the late 1970s it started to climb. Why?

If you look at the data, it shows that we’re eating about 240 kcal/day more now than we were then. And that increase in calories is primarily from carbohydrate. But the question remains: Why? Why do we eat more now than we did 50 years ago?

It depends upon whom you ask.

Some people believe we live in an era of food abundance.

I ate everything I wanted back then and never went to bed hungry. I was not food deprived. Neither was anyone in the photo above. In my house, there was always something to eat. And I ate it. Yet I didn’t get fat until I was in my 30s. Same with MD. And I’m sure it was the same with most everyone back then.

Carbs were just as good back then as they are now. They didn’t get more tasty in the 1970s. Carbs were carbs. And yet we began eating more of them.

As far as I can tell, three things have changed in our national diet since then. Although the total amount of fat we eat right now is, on average, the same as it was back in the 1950s and before, there is a big difference in the kind of fat we now eat. The percentage of saturated fat has gone down while the percentage of vegetable or seed oils has gone way up.

Here is a slide from a talk I gave about six years ago. Obviously correlation does not mean causation, but the correlation is pretty remarkable between the increase in obesity on the left and the increase in vegetable/seed oils on the right.

Looking at this chart, you can see the vegetable/seed oils increasing pretty quickly in the American diet. But, remember, the total fat didn’t really change. Which means saturated fat fell off the table.

If the type of fat has anything to do with obesity, then it could be either an increase in vegetable/seed oils or a decrease in saturated fat. Or both.

You might wonder why a fall of saturated fat could be problematic. A very smart guy in the UK has come up with a theory as to why the ratio of polyunsaturated fat (the primary constituent fat of veg/seed oils) to saturated fat could bring about an increase in obesity. The talk I gave that included the above graphics was on his theory, which I believe is accurate. The talk is kind of technical, but if you’re interested, it’s here.

You can read about it on the Hyperlipid blog. Just go to the Protons section, which you can find on the lower right. As I say, it’s kind of complex. I wrote a post about it a few years ago, which may make it a little simpler to understand.

It all involves the ratio of two electron carriers that end up—based on the ratio of PUFA to SFA—reducing insulin resistance in the adipose cells. More saturated fat increases the insulin resistance, which keeps nutrients from going into the fat cells, so they’re burned instead. An increase in the PUFA to SFA ratio does just the opposite, so fat and glucose go into the fat cells making them larger.

I believe this theory has a lot of validity. If so, one of the big ways you can lose fat and/or keep from gaining is by assiduously avoiding vegetable/seed oils. And by replacing them with saturated fat. Think meat vs processed foods. Or homemade vs commercial salad dressing. Or just about anything prepared outside your own or someone else’s home kitchen.

One other thing we need to be aware of is processed foods. I’m going to break this down into two categories.

First, is what everyone is now calling ultra-processed foods (UPF), which are foods made with ingredients one wouldn’t normally find in home kitchens. In this definition of processed foods—at least the one most people are familiar with now—UPFs are made with all kinds of flavorings, emulsifiers, preservatives, and a host of other chemicals. Those who believe these processed foods are driving the obesity epidemic are convinced this witch’s brew of chemicals that you see at the bottom of every packaged food will cause you to eat more of it.

I am in the process of pulling papers on every one of these commonly used chemicals, and so far, the ones I’ve found and read (I’m far from finished) do have some bad effects. I’ll give you a better overview when I’ve finished the project. But here is just one that is a common preservative and, in doses commonly found, can cause insulin resistance.

The other kind of processed food doesn’t have anything to do with added chemicals, but is instead ‘processed’ by grinding or pulping or any other method of preparation that damages the cells of whatever the product is.

When the structural integrity of a food is damaged, it stimulates what is called the incretin response. Which runs up insulin levels. And the more overweight an individual is, the more it runs insulin up.

I’ve put this short video up a number of times, but I’m going to put it up again so those who are new subscribers will know what I’m talking about.

The incretin effect will enhance the insulin effect of any processed food we eat.

If you look at the change in food since the 1950s and 1960s, you’ll find that the, say, breakfast cereals made then don’t have the number of chemicals in them that those same cereals do now. The cereals back then had the same incretin effect that the cereals do today, but that effect was blunted then as compared to now as so many more of us are overweight now.

Having said all this, what would I recommend to someone who wants to lose weight and keep it off?

Well, the first thing to understand is that if you are overweight, or, I guess a better word would be over-fat, you have a metabolic disharmony with the food you’re eating. You may love the food you’re eating, your regular diet, but it doesn’t love you. So, you’ve got to make a change.

In my view, the single best thing you can do to bring about the quickest results is to cut the carbs. That is the one change you can make that gives you the most leverage. When I first started treating patients with low-carb diets, that’s all I told them to do. And it worked.

When MD and I reviewed their diet diaries, we noticed they still ate a lot of crappy fats, but they still lost weight. And most of them did it relatively quickly. And the ones who cut the most carbs, lost the most weight.

The power of cutting carbs vs cutting calories was brought home to me in full color when our little clinic in Little Rock, Arkansas ended up being the largest center in the world (in terms of number of patients) in a Phase 3 study of orlistat, a proposed new weight loss drug at that time. The study was designed to determine if orlistat would work as a maintenance drug. The drug inhibited an enzyme that breaks down fat in the GI tract so it can be absorbed. If the fat isn’t broken down, much of it will pass on through and out of the body. The drug put people on a sort of artificial low-fat diet since they weren’t absorbing most of what they ate.

The drug company had already determined the drug would work for weight loss, so they wanted to see if people who took it after their weight loss would maintain the weight loss.

All the people entering the study had to go on a low-calorie, low-fat diet for six months to lose weight, then they would be randomized to one of three doses of orlistat or a placebo.

In order to make it into the maintenance phase of the study, they had to lose 4 percent of their body weight in the six month lead in. Which meant that anyone weighing 200 pounds had to lose 8 pounds in six months. Doesn’t seem like a lot of weight to lose over six months, especially with all the hand holding, dietitian consults, and everything else we provided as part of the study protocol. But you wouldn’t believe how many of these folks couldn’t do it and were kicked out of the study by the drug company.

The other problem we had, was that these study patients would sit in the waiting room along with our regular low-carb weight loss patients, and they would talk. When the study patients heard how much weight our regular low-carb patients were losing, they wanted to bail out of the study, for which they were being paid, and become our regular patients for which they would have to pay. It was a real eye opener for MD and me. If we had any doubts about the effectiveness of our dietary strategy, the drug study took care of those.

Since then, the Public Health Collaboration in the UK has been tabulating every study that has been published comparing the low-carb diet to the low-fat, low-calorie diet in terms of weight loss. So far, the group has found 71 studies that meet their criteria in terms of carb restriction and time. Here is what they found.

What the above summary shows is that of the 71 studies evaluated, 62 showed more weight loss in the low-carb arm than in the low-fat arm, while 7 studies out of the 71 showed more weight loss in the low-fat arm.

In an evaluation in terms of statistical significance (a wee p), the low-carb diet ended up reaching a statistically-significant difference in weight loss 39 times out of 71 studies whereas the low-fat diet never reached a statistically significant difference. In other words, the 7 times out of the 71 studies in which the low-fat diet triumphed, the difference was insignificantly small.

When you take into account that many of these studies had the low-fat diet calorically controlled while the low-carb diet was not—in other words, those on the low-fat diet had to stay within a caloric limit while those on the low-carb arm could eat all they wanted as long as they kept their carb count within the set amount—the outcome is even more impressive.

Based on my own clinical experience combined with what the Public Health Collaboration has determined, I can confidently say that the low-carb diet is the best way to lose weight for the greatest number of people.

Another advantage of the low-carb diet is that it is typically high in protein, which helps increase and maintain muscle mass, an incredibly important factor in healthy aging. As we all know, protein and fat are found together in nature. Think meat, eggs, dairy. By cutting fat from the diet, as people do on low-fat diets, you almost always cut protein. Which is not a good thing.

If you want to lose quickly without being hungry and without losing muscle mass, the low-carb diet is the way to go.

One of the nice things about following a low-carb diet is that you avoid most processed foods, almost all of which are filled with high-carb crap. And not only high-carb crap, but all the chemicals, bad fats, and other junk as well.

Plus, when you avoid all these high-carb packaged foods, you’ll have a much lower incretin effect. Fat has almost no incretin effect, and it’s minimal with protein.

If you go low-carb, you’ll have maximal leverage. The lower you go, the more leverage you’ll have. If you want to make it even better, work to avoid all the vegetable and seed oils you can. Just going low-carb—if you do it right—will keep you away from all the processed foods. But it’s possible to still consume bad oils and stay low-carb.

To get the full power of the low-carb diet, I would recommend you use beef tallow for cooking. It’s often difficult to find in quantity, and when you do find it, it’s kind of expensive. We use one we get from Amazon and it lasts forever.

We’ve got a can in the fridge now. Beef tallow lasts forever and greatly enhances the taste of any foods cooked in it. McDonald’s French fries used to be cooked in beef tallow, and they were great. Then when the company shifted to vegetable oils for health reasons (fools!) their French fries weren’t for crap. It took food technologists some time to come up with all the flavorings and other chemical enhancements so that the fries cooked in vegetable oil tasted similar to the ones cooked in beef tallow. So now you’re getting fries loaded with vegetable/seed oils and a bunch of flavoring. As Trump would say: Sad.

I noticed that this same company has a spray version of its beef tallow. We’ve never tried it, so I can’t give it a personal recommendation.

You can’t really use beef tallow as a salad dressing because it is a solid at room temperature. We mostly use macadamia nut oil, which has almost no PUFA in it. And it has a nice kind of nutty taste. We don’t get it from Amazon; we just buy whatever we find at the whole foods grocery we shop wherever we are. It’s kind of pricy, but we don’t use a lot of it, so it lasts a while.

If you’ve read all this and say to yourself, I don’t want to go on a low-carb diet. What can I do?

I would say, go back to a diet from the 1950s when few people were overweight. Eat what you want, but cook all your food at home. And don’t eat anything but real food. Meat, vegetables, green and colorful, not starchy. Scrutinize everything you buy to make sure it doesn’t have a bunch of chemicals in the ingredients list. If it does, avoid it. Stay away from all packaged foods. If you’re careful in doing this, you should lose weight slowly and keep it off. If you don’t, then realize you would have been one of the small percentage of people in the 1950s who were overweight and carb sensitive. Then you’ll have to make a choice. Carbs or thinness.

Hah, I just took a break before moving on to the next section and scanned my emails, which I’m woefully behind on. As it turns out, my friend Nina Teicholz has a new post out all about processed foods. Here it is in its entirety.

Junk Food has been Rebranded as “Ultra-processed”

Okay, time for my weekly piteous plea for paid subscribers. The incalculable joy of reading The Arrow ends up costing only about 16 cents per day. That calculates to about 1/125 of a $19.99 Whole Foods ribeye steak (when you can find them at $19.99 per pound). Or an even smaller amount when compared to a big can of beef tallow. A small price to pay for weekly enlightenment.

What Is a Wee P?

A wee P (terminology coined by my friend Matt Briggs) is a p-value under 0.05, which signifies statistical significance. The smaller the number, or wee-er the p, the more confidence the finding (whatever it was) is real.

In the old days, scientists didn’t use P values. They looked for findings of great certainty. If they put a dozen birds in a vacuum chamber and they all died, then they pretty much knew birds needed oxygen to live. There was no statistical significance about it. It was binary. They lived or they died.

Now scientists look at things differently. They don’t look for large effects. They evaluate a hundred outcomes, then run the numbers through an equation to determine if their findings have any statistical significance.

I just read a fascinating piece on this, so figured I would pass it on to you. It explains a lot. And is fun to read.

There are no statistics in the Kingdom of God

The War In Ukraine

Okay, Tucker Carlson has an interview with Vladimir Putin tonight that I can’t wait to watch. I just read John Schindler’s Substack on the war in Ukraine. He doesn’t pull any punches.

Schindler is an historian, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College, a former NSA intelligence analyst and counter-intelligence officer. He speaks multiple languages and writes for multiple intelligence journals. I was introduced to him through his first book Unholy Terror, which educated me as to why so much of Central Europe is Muslim. It’s a great book, but kind of pricey.

I don’t agree with all of his politics, but I do always listen to what he has to say.

Below is his take on the war in Ukraine. Usually, he keeps these behind a paywall, but this one apparently not. I wonder how many General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorfs we have on our side?

Ukraine is Losing the War

Art Comes in Strange Flavors

I’m a little hesitant to write this for reasons that will be obvious as you read along. I came across the video below somewhere in the last couple of weeks. I found it languishing in one of my hundreds of open tabs and couldn’t remember where I found it in the first place, so I can’t give a hat tip to the person who put me on to it.

It’s a video of a guy going through all the steps of putting together an art installation. There are a zillion little pieces of stepwise art created throughout. The video itself ends up being the work of art. It’s a combo of sculpture, music, lighting, conversation, modeling, and on and on.

The tableau was inspired by Mel Gibson’s drunken racist outburst during his arrest a number of years ago for driving under the influence. I can sort of remember reading about the whole fiasco, which was obviously embarrassing to Gibson. He would be a goner if he did it today, but it’s long been forgotten by most people.

Anyway, given the subject matter I’m going to write about here, I’m probably courting my own cancellation.

In the video, the guy who does it sculpts the head of Mel Gibson. Which he later goes on to miniaturize and paint so that it fits in with the tableau. He does this meticulous job of sculpting the head and face, but it isn’t Mel Gibson’s face. In fact, it looks nothing like him. Which I find a bit disconcerting. As I said to MD when we watched it, “If I did that sculpture, it would sure as hell look like Mel Gibson.”

Now here is where it starts getting uncomfortable for me. Why don’t you watch the video, then we’ll re-group on the other side.

See what I mean. It looks nothing like Mel Gibson.

The reason I know I could make it look just like Mel Gibson is that I was born with the art gene. Whatever that is. I can’t take credit for it. It’s been there since birth. And I rarely use it because I don’t particularly like to. I mean it’s okay, but I’m not meant to sit around in a studio all day and create. [The bride would disagree, but then…] There are a thousand other things I would rather do. But the innate ability is in there—I just seldom let it out.

I go through life looking at everything as if I were going to paint it or draw it or sculpt it. I never do, but I always think about it. Driving along in a car, I’ll imagine how I would paint a specific tree or an interesting looking house. And I know I could draw or paint it perfectly. It’s not weird to me, but it is to other people if I mention it.

When I was in medical school, I was always short of money. Back then student loans barely covered tuition. So I was working part time still as an engineer and teaching SCUBA diving. I ran into a guy somewhere who became a good friend at that time, though I haven’t laid eyes on him in 40 years. He was a lawyer and a huge Civil War enthusiast. I’ve never been particularly interested in the Civil War, and I still to this day know precious little about it. I’ve always been much more interested in European history than American history.

This friend of mine was also always looking for ways of making money, as he was just starting out in a solo private law practice. He had seen a bust of some Civil War general somewhere and asked me if I would go in with him to hire someone to sculpt a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest. I asked, ‘Who is/was Nathan Bedford Forrest?’ He proceeded to tell me how NBF, as we took to calling him, was a brilliant Confederate general from Memphis, whose campaigns were studied in all the military academies the world over. There was no internet at the time, so I had no way of looking old Nate up without going to the library. I didn’t realize at the time that along with his combat brilliance, there were some other unsavory facts in his history. 

My friend said if we could get someone to make a bust of him that we could reproduce, we could sell them in Civil War Times, a magazine devoted to all things having to do with the Civil War. If we could get a bust made inexpensively enough, he thought we could sell a zillion copies via mail order.

I told him I could make the bust. He asked me if he could see any busts I had made before. I told him I had never made one. But I knew I could because I had seen the picture of Nathan Bedford Forrest. And I knew if I got my hands on some clay, I could do it.

He didn’t believe me. So I went out to an art store in Little Rock and bought some clay. I used the small photo my friend had given me of NBF and made the bust in about two hours. As I said, I had never sculpted anything before, but I knew I could do it.

There was no internet at the time, so I didn’t know what other busts of NBF looked like. I looked it up on Google moments ago and mine is as good as any out there. I have a couple of copies in storage right now. but MD found a photo from our library where I had one sitting. She wasn’t taking a photo of it, but of the library. I’ve blown it up and it’s a bit fuzzy but you can see it. Not bad for a first effort.

We ended up getting it made in plaster, having it painted in several colors, and selling the absolute crap out of it from a small ad in Civil War Times.

Since that one sold so well, I decided to make one of Robert E. Lee. I thought it was better than NBF, but it didn’t sell nearly as well. I had one of those in our library, too, which is in storage. Here is the blow up from the photo MD took of the library.

My buddy and I figured we could just keep cranking these busts out and selling them. We found this magazine called Yankee, which had a much larger circulation than Civil War Times, so we decided to give it a go. Not, of course, with Confederate generals, but with George Washington. I whipped out a bust of old George Washington (another general), we paid a fortune for the ad, and we were lucky if we sold five of them. I think I still have one of ol’ George somewhere, but I haven’t seen it in forever.  Maybe one of the kids has it.

So, I absolutely know I could make a bust of Mel Gibson that looked like Mel Gibson.

It’s just easy for me, so I figure it’s easy for everyone. I ended up taking a class in sculpture given at the Arkansas Art Center, and I looked at everyone else’s stuff and realized it wasn’t easy. At least not for them. I ended up giving the bust I was working on to the model who was posing for the class. I kind of wish I still had it, but what would I do with a bust of just someone I don’t know?

Having this ability has made me aware of it in other people. And has kept me from being suicidal when others have the same ability in other arts.

I come from a totally unmusical family. We didn’t even have a stereo until I was a junior in high school. About halfway through my junior year, I taught myself how to play the guitar. I’ve played  it since. I’m not all that great, but I can accompany if everyone is singing. And I’m okay at picking out songs I hear. But no one will ever mistake me for Eric Clapton.

When I was in my internship, I got fired up to play the violin. I figured the guitar is a stringed instrument, and I was used to playing a stringed instrument, so how hard could it be? Well, I soon found out. I bought a violin and started lessons. I took one lesson per week. And in short order I discovered the violin was a totally different beast from the guitar. I did not progress quickly. About three or four weeks into the effort, I showed up for my weekly lesson and a guy was just wrapping up his lesson. My instructor introduced us, and told the guy to play something for me. I can’t remember what it was, because I was so devastated. He whipped some fiddle tune out like he had been playing for a lifetime. I asked him how long he had been playing, and my instructor said, “He started the same week you did.”  And I was still scrawking out Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in a semi-recognizable form. I almost quit. But then I realized that people have different innate talents. And if I could draw or paint or sculpt anything I wanted effortlessly, I shouldn’t feel bad that others can and do shame me in other endeavors. It was actually a comfort.

I’m always wondering if those who can just, say, sit down and play the piano without ever having a lesson feel the same way. Do they just know it in their bones? When I was in college I dated a girl whose grandmother could do that. She had never had a lesson. And never remembered not being able to play the piano. We were at her house, and Burt Bacharach came on whatever was on on her TV and played Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. She says, Oh, that song is beautiful, staggers over to the piano, and plays it perfectly.

When I was a senior in medical school, I had some time on my hands. The senior year is a sort of payback for the first three years. It’s mainly elective. While I was on one of the wards, I came across a gerontology magazine with a great photo of an old guy on the front. I decided to draw it. I figured pencil would be the best way to do it, but I had never done a pencil drawing. At least not more than just doodling. So I went to the art store, got myself a couple of art pencils, and some kind of paper that was supposed to last for pencil art. And I spent a few hours cranking out the face on the magazine with some artistic license. I still have it.

Looking at this one for the first time in a long time, I can see a lot of improvements that could be made were I to redo it.

In short order, I found another great photo on the cover of another gerontology magazine, so I drew it, too.

This one I like as it is, but I had already had some practice before I did it.

I had so much fun that in the space of about a month, I churned out maybe ten pencil drawings. That was over forty years ago, and I haven’t done one since.

But it’s still there. I know I could do Mel Gibson. I know I could draw or paint anything I wanted to. I just don’t want to.

What it takes to be a real genius in something is the innate ability and the drive to do it. When it comes to anything artistic, I’m as far from driven as can be. I would vastly prefer to spend a couple of hours digging into a medical paper than I would doing drawing. [The bride frequently refers to this refusal to engage in creating art as ‘spitting in God’s eye’. So there’s that.]

I always wonder how many other people there are out there like that.

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Odds and Ends

• The FBI agent who investigated D.B. Cooper says the case remains “secretly” open.

• Baby names at risk of going extinct in 2024. Thank God Michael isn’t among them.

• Rats like taking selfies, too.

• Pet detective uses thermal energy to track down lost dogs and reunite them with their owners.

• 83 bottles of wine worth $1.6M stolen from Tour d’Argent in Paris sometime between 2020-2024. They should take inventory more often.

• Golf is an extremely difficult sport, even for the GOAT.

• Informed Consent Action Network obtains data used to identify hot lots of Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines.

• What were the death tolls in pandemics throughout history?

• Clarence the angel takes Gavin Newsom to Florida to show him what California would look like if he'd never been born.

• Premature cardiac deaths on the rise in the UK. They have been on a steady increase since 2020.

• Small restaurant owner in New Hampshire crushes META in NH Supreme Court. I would love to see more of this.

• Dan Wang’s 2023 letter. ‘Nuff said.

• Kid gets trapped in claw arcade game. Our middle kid, who never misses in this game, could have had him “clawed” out in about five seconds.

• Illuminating article on Demetre Daskalakis, the CDC doctor responsible for hiding myocarditis and promoting vaccines. I hope somehow, sometime, these people are made to pay.

• Everything you ever wanted to know about codpieces, but were afraid to ask.

• Artifact reveals people were probably fed to the lions in Roman Britain. Not a particularly pleasant way to go.

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Okay, time for the

Video of the Week

I almost can’t watch this one. I’m glad there are people out there like this guy. I can tell you I’m not one of them.

Wild, eh?

Time for the poll.

Once more, a lot of info today and got kind of carried away. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

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