The Arrow #163

Hello friends.

Greetings from Dallas.

Just as I sat down to start writing this Arrow, a post from one of my favorite writers popped up in my email. I was having a bit of trouble getting started—which is always the hardest part—and this post gave me the opening I was looking for. I’ll wrap up this edition with another topic, semi-sort of (ie, elites vs peasants), on the same subject.

N.S. Lyons writes that he

was watching a bit of recent footage of some peasants in revolt, as they are at the moment basically everywhere across the West, and was suddenly struck by the recollection that I’d definitely read a wise saying about the general situation somewhere on a fortune cookie. No, wait, I realized, this time it must actually have been from Master Confucius himself! So I went digging through my copy of the Analect…

He finds what he was looking for in Chapter 7 of Book 12 where a “disciple asks Confucius what, fundamentally, it takes to govern a state without it collapsing.”

Confucius says: “Simply make sure there is enough armaments, enough food, and that you have the trust of the common people.” (足食，足兵，民信之矣.)

“If sacrificing one of these three things becomes unavoidable, which would you give up first?” the disciple asks. (必不得已而去，於斯三者何先?)

“The weapons,” Confucius replies. (去兵.)

“If two things?” the disciple asks. (必不得已而去，於斯二者何先?)

“The food,” Confucius says, because while even death is a part of life “without the trust of the people, a state cannot stand.” (去食. 自古皆有死，民無信不立.)

He then goes on to say

What is most notable to me from this little dialogue from almost 2,500 years ago is how much, in comparison, our political leaders, in their hubris and absorption in grand projects (and graft), seem to have forgotten the very basics.

If you think about it, you’ll realize we are going the wrong way. At least according to Confucius. We’ve got an ever-increasing, massive defense budget, which is larger than the next eight countries combined. Our leaders are trying their best to screw with our food supply. Cows are causing climate change and all. And no one trusts our government any longer. Our politics are totally tribal, so people trust their party—or at least try to make excuses for its misbehavior. But no one really trusts the government.

And, in my view at least, the government doesn’t deserve our trust.

The whole post is short and well worth reading in its entirety.

Confucius Says “lol, lmao”

Okay, on to some medical stuff. I can link to the various sections of this newsletter, so I’m going to do a section that is an explainer. Then whenever I have the need to reference it, I can just use a link instead of having to write an entire paragraph or two on it.

I learned about this in medical school. I probably should have learned it in engineering school, but it was probably taught during the winter quarter I almost flunked out because I was skiing every day instead of going to class.

If you already know what osmotic pressure is, skip on down.

So, here goes…

Osmotic Pressure

Most people have never heard of osmotic pressure, but it works its magic throughout the body.

Everyone has heard of osmosis in terms of ‘learning by osmosis’. Which means learning kind of passively just by being around a particular trade or activity. The knowledge just basically seeps in, and you absorb it.

According to Wikipedia, the technical definition of osmosis is that it…

is the spontaneous net movement or diffusion of solvent molecules through a selectively-permeable membrane from a region of high water potential (region of lower solute concentration) to a region of low water potential (region of higher solute concentration), in the direction that tends to equalize the solute concentrations on the two sides.

So it is with knowledge. If you’re around people with a high level of knowledge that they talk about, some of it passively diffuses into your brain.

Okay, what is osmotic pressure?

Let’s assume we have an aquarium partially filled with water.

We divide this aquarium in half with a semi-permeable membrane that allows water to seep through it, but lets nothing else through.

Since the water can move back and forth across the membrane, the water remains at the same level on each side of the membrane.

Now let’s sprinkle some pink Himalayan sea salt into the water on the left side of the membrane.

When you start adding the salt to one side, nothing much happens right off the bat. The water level is still the same on both sides.

But over a bit of time, the water levels change? Why? Because the water can go back and forth through the membrane, but the salt can’t. The salt stays on the left. The water wants to maintain the same concentration of salt throughout. Since the salt can’t go through to equalize the concentration, the water moves from right to left to try to equalize the concentration on both sides.

The water level goes up on the left side of the aquarium and down on the right, so the levels are different even though the water can easily go back and forth through the membrane.

You might wonder why the water doesn’t all flow into the left side of the tank since it’s on a mission to keep the concentration the same throughout all the water.

The osmotic pressure is the reason.

The difference in elevation of the water on the left side pushes down trying to bring the right side up to equal to the level it was in the first graphic above. But the force of the water trying to keep the concentration the same on both sides moves the water to the left. When an equilibrium is reached as shown above, the the difference in salt concentration created by the osmosis equals the pressure difference of the two levels of water. That difference in pressure is referred to as the osmotic pressure.

In other words, the pressure to maintain equal concentrations can be measured as the difference in pressure exerted by the difference in water level.

If you were to put even more salt in the left side of the tank, the water level would rise there even higher thanks to even greater osmotic pressure.

Okay, so how does this work in real life?

Although they look like solid tubes, our blood vessels are porous like the semi-permeable membrane shown above. Fluid can leak out of them. The fluid stays in the blood vessels because there is a lot of protein in there, which keeps the concentration up, and via osmotic pressure keeps the fluid in the the vessels.

(You almost had to figure this would all have something to do with my obsession with protein. And if you did, you’d be correct.)

As long as protein levels in the blood are adequate, the fluid moves along inside the blood vessels where it belongs. If a problem develops with the protein levels, fluid leaks from the blood vessels into the tissues where it doesn’t belong.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples and their causes.

Here is a young kid with a disorder, common in many third world countries, called Kwashiorkor, which is an African word that means a sickness that comes when a new baby arrives.

When the first baby is born, it gets plenty of protein via breast milk, but when the next baby comes, it gets the breast milk and its older sibling starts eating a bunch of plant mush — boiled rice, cream of wheat, mashed something-or-other. Consequently, the first baby ends up with insufficient protein. It gets enough calories, but not enough good quality protein. The second baby is getting all the good breast milk protein.

The liver becomes enlarged due to fatty accumulation. It can become inflamed and fibrotic as well. Since the liver basically is the clearing house for protein, it can’t make enough albumin, which is the main protein in the blood. As a consequence of the low protein, there’s lower osmotic pressure, and the fluid seeps out, causing a condition called ascites, which is fluid accumulation in the belly.

Here is another example, though this one veers on marasmus, which is total starvation: not enough calories, and not enough protein. But note the enlarged abdominal area in the face of severe protein malnutrition. You can see the emaciated arms and every rib, and the edema in this poor little girl’s feet, as fluid accumulates there.

The same thing happens to people who have alcoholic- and non-alcoholic liver disease. When it reaches the point of significant liver damage, the remaining functioning liver can’t keep up with the production of enough albumin, so the belly swells as do the feet and ankles.

Being able to maintain good osmotic pressure where needed is vital to the body’s proper functioning. And to maintain good osmotic pressure requires a decent dose of good quality dietary protein.

For those of you who didn’t know what osmotic pressure is, I hope you found that informative.

Medieval Disease Still Lurks in the US

The bubonic plague recently infected an individual in central Oregon. You may have thought the plague was a disease of medieval times, but not so. It’s actually common in the Southwest United States.

It infects a lot of prairie dogs and other wild rodents. If you spend any time in New Mexico, where MD and I lived part time for about ten years, you’ll see signs all over the place carrying warnings against playing with prairie dogs. As if prairie dogs readily give themselves over to being played with. They vanish pretty quickly if you try to approach them. They, of course, are riddled with the fleas that sometimes harbor Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague.

I didn’t realize plague still existed until I learned about it in medical school. As I discovered, it is still very much with us.

It comes in two forms. The bubonic plague that infects lymph nodes causing them to enlarge and discolor, e.g., become buboes. The other version is the much more serious pneumonic plague that infects the lungs. You don’t want to get either version if you can avoid it.

If you are unfortunate enough to get infected, it can pretty easily be treated with antibiotics. But it requires awareness on the part of the treating physician. Most docs in the Southwest are on alert for it. But if you travel to the Southwest and get flea bitten, then fly home to, say, New Jersey, your doc there probably wouldn’t even think of the plague. At least it would be very low on the differential diagnosis of what might be ailing you.

So, I’ll alert you. If you travel in the Southwest, including the middle of Oregon, and get a flea bite followed by symptoms, bring the plague up as a possibility to your doctor at home. You can find a pretty good run down of the symptoms here. The main one for all forms of the plague is high fever and chills.

According to the article about the Oregonian who got infected, the disease is pretty rare.

In the U.S., an average of 7 cases of human plague is reported each year, according to the CDC, and about 80% of them are the bubonic form of the disease. Most of those cases were in the rural western and southwestern U.S.

That’s about how I remember it from med school, although from the posted warning signs in New Mexico, you would think it’s all over the place.

My view is that it is one of those diseases made less severe over time. There have been many mutations since the Middle Ages, so I would bet—though I have no way to prove this—that nowadays a number of people get mild cases every year that don’t even result in medical visits.

And there are probably a lot of people who have natural immunity. Think about what happened in the Middle Ages. The disease was in its fully virulent form then. I’m sure the vast majority of the population was riddled with fleas. Certainly far more than today. And yet I suspect only a fraction of them came down with the plague. At least from what we know from history only a fraction of them—maybe a hefty fraction—died from it. And that was before antibiotics.

I’m not suggesting you ignore what might be a case of the plague. Far from it. I’m simply making the case that, like all infectious diseases, the plague has become more benign over time. It can still be deadly though to certain individuals. So hasten to your doc to get antibiotics if you believe you may have been infected.

Also, if you do live in a plague-endemic area, you might want to be careful about handling rodents of any kind. The article discusses how one guy—also in Oregon—got the plague in 2012 by trying to pull “a rodent out of his choking cat’s mouth.” It cost him his “fingertips and toes.” So, I would think twice about that unless I really loved that cat.

Speaking of cats…

Firemen and Cats in Trees

MD sent me an article she read in the Dallas Morning News (originally published in the Washington Post) about a guy who has gained some measure of local fame for rescuing cats from trees. He runs a tree trimming service, so he has all the equipment at hand to effect the rescue.

MD sent me the article because I’ve told the tale many times about my short-lived career as a fireman.

While I was working as an engineer, I had one of those great moments of decision like Jethro Bodine did on The Beverly Hillbillies. In one hilarious episode, Jethro was trying to decide whether he wanted to be a brain surgeon or a soda jerk. In my case, I was trying to decide if I wanted to go to medical school or buy and operate a dive boat.

I was heavily into SCUBA diving. I had every SCUBA teaching certificate one could have. I taught SCUBA and did a little salvage diving when I had the chance. And, in general, spent a lot of my spare time underwater and daydreamed of finding great sunken treasure.

I ultimately made the decision to go to medical school, but I didn’t have all the prerequisites. I hadn’t taken organic chemistry in engineering school, and O-chem is a total prerequisite. I tried to talk my bosses in the engineering firm I worked for to let me take the O-chem course at the University of California at San Diego, which was about 30 mins away from where I was working. They ixnayed it. About the same time I was getting that bad news, I discovered the fire department in Carlsbad—the little beach town in which I was working—was looking to hire three firemen.

I hadn’t wanted to be a fireman since I was a little kid — when for a few years that had truly been my life’s goal — but I knew firemen had a lot of time off. So I went through all the BS it took to apply for the job and ended up landing one of the spots and going to work as a fireman.

I did indeed have a lot of time off, so I used it to get the prerequisite courses I needed at UCSD while maintaining a semblance of my erstwhile engineering income.

I hated being a fireman for a thousand different reasons. Other than the time off, that is. The very first day I was on the job, there was the biggest fire in Carlsbad’s history. So, after the excitement of dealing with the fire, I learned the joys of cleaning all the zillions of feet of hose used.

Anyway, I wrote an entire essay on my experiences as a fireman that I may publish here sometime.

But what does this have to do with cats?

There exists this pervasive myth that firemen rescue cats from trees. One of the common calls we got at the fire station was from women who wanted us to come rescue their cats that were stuck up in trees and wouldn’t come down. Although I had seen mention of this in TV shows and illustrations, I never really thought people would actually call the fire department about it. But they did. And in larger numbers than you would think.

In the Carlsbad Fire Department there were two shifts. An A shift and a B shift. Each shift had the same personnel and worked every other day on 24-hour shifts. This didn’t mean I worked every other day—far from it, in fact. Within each A and B group there were rotating days off, so that when it all settled out a given fireman worked only about six days per month.

It was our policy, which came down from the top, not to tie up our equipment on cat rescues. Most of the guys would politely tell the people who called that we were sorry, but the city wouldn’t allow us to rescue cats.

One guy on my crew, who was an old timer (and kind of a prick, but a funny one) almost always answered any calls we might get. If it was a fire, we didn’t get a call. The dispatcher hit the honker, and this loud honk, which sounded like a chair being dragged across the floor at about a million decibels would sound, and everyone would race for their turnouts (the garb we wore to fires). But a lot of calls came directly into the fire station by phone from citizens about other things than fires.

When one came in about a cat rescue, and this one guy answered, the conversation went like this:

Carlsbad Fire Department, how can I help you?

The woman would ask about a cat stuck in a tree, afraid to come down. (It was invariably a female who called about a cat in a tree).

The guy would respond: “Lady, let me ask you a question. How many cat skeletons have you ever seen up in a tree?”

Long pause while the flustered woman tried to deal with the response.

“Sooner or later the cat will come down. Thanks for calling.”

I’ve told this story a hundred times, which is why MD forwarded me the article this morning. Brought back one of the very few positive, or at least funny, memories of my time as a fireman.

A Troubling Development

Ivor Cummins notified our low-carb email group this morning about a law that was quietly passed in France. It came from his X/Twitter/Whatever feed.

SOURCE

If you pull the article referenced in Ivor’s Tweet, you will discover how unsettling it really is. The article is in German, but I used Google to translate it to English.

Here are a couple of salient paragraphs.

A new criminal offense in France could in future land people in prison who encourage people to withhold appropriate medical treatment (according to “science”). The law was pushed through the National Assembly on Wednesday. Critics call the law “Article Pfizer.”

Without much attention, a law was passed in France on Wednesday that could criminalize resistance to mRNA treatment. Anyone who advises against mRNA or other “medical treatments” that are “ obviously suitable” for treatment based on the current state of medical knowledge can in future be imprisoned in France for up to three years or receive a fine of up to 45,000 euros.

Repression against medical critics

It was a hard-fought issue, but the Macron regime ultimately got its way. Article 4 is central to the new law, which was first deleted but then reinstated. This creates a new criminal offense and criminalizes the “ request to stop or refrain from therapeutic or prophylactic medical treatment” as well as “the request to use practices that are presented as therapeutic or prophylactic ”. This means that any resistance to mRNA treatment (and other corporate medical methods) can be criminalized in the future.

As you can see from the second paragraph above, the Macron administration has criminalized anyone who doesn’t follow The Science, as determined by the poobahs in the Macron regime or whatever regime may be in control the next time around.

“Anyone who advises against mRNA or other ‘medical treatments’ that are ‘obviously suitable’ for treatment based on the current state of medical knowledge can be thrown in jail and fined up to 45,000 euros (~$48,500 today).

One of the folks on the list reminded us that vaccines for heart disease are in the works and posted a published paper on it titled Two Decades of Vaccine Development Against Atherosclerosis.

I came to the email party late, because I was hard at work on this edition of The Arrow, but others were all over it. One of the docs went through the paper linked above and pointed out this sentence that led off one of the subheadings:

The predominant reason for the onset of atherosclerosis is the accumulation of LDL on the arterial walls.

This relatively short sentence is wrong in almost every way imaginable.

First and foremost, it states that the predominant reason for the development of CVD is LDL. That is an hypothesis, not a fact. Never been proven. But it is stated categorically as a fact. “The predominant reason…” Not, It is thought by many… Or some other such weasel way of saying it.

This paper was published a little over six months ago, so it is the state of The Science about which we’ve heard so much. And according to the law just passed in France, anyone who might advise against anyone taking a vaccine against LDL, could be thrown in the Bastille.

Had this law been in effect in the US, I would be buried under the jail, as would all the others advising people against the Covid vaccines and against statins. Especially since The Science says the vaccines are safe and effective and that a lower LDL is better.

Thank God Macron and his henchmen aren’t running things here. Pity the French.

The way, way left legislature in California ginned up such a bill a year or two ago that would allow the state to terminate doctors’ medical licenses if they advised their patients against the Covid vaccine. A physician’s advocacy group immediately filed suit against it. I think Gavin Newsom actually signed the thing, then reneged on it once he saw the writing on the judicial wall.

So, things like this are not unheard of here. We just dodged a bullet with this one. But it speaks volumes that the legislature of the state with the largest population in the country—representing 10% of the US population—would pass such a bill.

Viagra and Heart Disease

I was having a conversation with an old friend from Little Rock the other day when the whole idea of Viagra and heart disease came up. My friend is a regular user of Viagra, and he brought up a funny situation from our past.

Years and years ago, he called me asking if I would call in a prescription of Viagra for him. His regular doc was out of town, and my friend was out of Viagra. He gave me the number of the pharmacy he used, so I called it in for him.

Now I had never called in a prescription for Viagra, nor had I ever used it myself, so I had no idea how much it cost. So when I get the pharmacist on the phone, I give her all the info on the patient and tell her to give him thirty 100mg tabs (he had asked me for the 100 mg version, which he breaks in two). There is this long pause, then she says, “You realize this prescription is going to cost close to $3,000, right?”

“Holy %$*#,” I respond, “are you kidding me?”

No, she says, they cost around $100 per 100 mg tab. I told her I had never called in a prescription for Viagra and asked her what the usual amount was. She told me this patient usually got them a couple at a time.

In our conversation a few days ago after we had laughed about my Viagra price naiveté, he asked me if Viagra would prevent heart disease. I know how it works. It’s a phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor, which ends up increasing the nitric oxide in the arteries, which opens them up and improves their health. It opens up the arteries to let more blood into the penis, which then is able to do its thing, which is turgid-dependent. No reason it wouldn’t help with other arteries.

I told him I figured it did, but that I would run a troll through the medical literature to see what I could find and get back to him.

And indeed it appears that it probably does. I came across a recently published article with the unwieldy title Effect of phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors on major adverse cardiovascular events and overall mortality in a large nationwide cohort of men with erectile dysfunction and cardiovascular risk factors: A retrospective, observational study based on healthcare claims and national death index data.

I could find no randomized controlled trials, so this was the best I could do. According to the data in the study, it looks like Viagra is substantially better than statins ever hoped to be in preventing deaths from heart disease and related disorders.

I have to give the caveat that statins were tested in multiple randomized, controlled trials. But the results pretty much sucked. The only group who had decreased all-cause mortality were men under 65 who had already had a heart attack. Not just supposed risk factors for a heart attack, but an actual heart attack. And even in that group, the results weren’t all that great. You can read about it here in a very good article published for the lay press at about the time the last of these statin RCTs were completed.

There have been no such RCTs on Viagra for heart disease, but the observational studies look really good. If the RCTs turned out to be like this, the drug would be worth a fortune.

Which raises the question, why doesn’t Pfizer do these studies? The drug is off patent now, but its patent (I’m assuming—I haven’t seen it) is for erectile dysfunction. Colchicine, which has been generic forever, was recently patented as a heart disease preventative drug. And the price went from a nickel a tablet to about $5. Why can’t they do this with Viagra?

Since Viagra is off patent now, I decided to take a look to see what the price is now. In Dallas pharmacies, which is what Google fed me as I looked it up here, it has fallen significantly. Here is the cheapest price I found for the generic.

Just for grins, I clicked on the “Switch to brand medication” link. Wow!

It’s still right up there where it was when I tried to call it in for my friend. Maybe a bit cheaper now, but not all that much.

I suppose since the drug is approved for erectile dysfunction, even if it got approved for the treatment of heart disease, docs would write it for the generic. Since it costs so much to get drugs through the approval process, Pfizer would take forever to recoup their costs if they could sell it for only $30 per month.

Plus, they would have to go through the entire FDA approval process, which would cost many millions of dollars. And there is no guarantee that the RCTs would show what the observational studies showed. Knowing how the drug works, however, my bet is that the studies would show a huge advantage.

So, because of the screwed up way the drug approval process works, a really good drug may be denied a public who could benefit from it. I doubt many physicians would feel comfortable prescribing Viagra to prevent heart disease, but I think it would do their patients vastly more good than a statin.

Okay, time for my weekly plaintive plea for paid subscribers in an effort to pay the bills. The inestimable joy of reading The Arrow ends up costing only about 16 cents per day. That calculates to 1/4 of a month’s worth of generic Viagra. Or about 0.2% of the name brand stuff. A small price to pay for weekly enlightenment.

Change Your Diet; Change Your Mind

I just came across this article Georgia Ede wrote. It’s the last thing you would think you would find written by a kind, lovely, mellow, Harvard-trained psychiatrist.

She starts it off this way:

Meat is good for you. There are experts who might disagree with me, and many researchers continue to search for evidence linking meat to heart disease, for example.

But as a Harvard-trained, board-certified psychiatrist specializing in nutritional and metabolic psychiatry, I’ve long been curious about the relationship between food and brain health, as well as overall well-being. And in my research, I’ve yet to find a credible, plausible health argument against eating meat of any kind (including red meat, seafood, and poultry).

In fact, no other food group is nutritious enough, safe enough, or geographically accessible enough to recommend as the healthy foundation of the optimal human diet. 

So if I could only afford to buy food from one food group, I’d prioritize meat.

If you met Georgia in the flesh and spent ten minutes with her, you would never suspect she is basically a carnivore. She is just too nice and kind. She doesn’t fit the (totally bogus) stereotype of a carnivore at all. Yet she pretty much is.

And her book discusses why more meat is better. Why you shouldn’t fear it. And what it does to your brain to cut the carbs and increase good quality fat.

An early chapter of her book is one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read of the sorry state of nutritional ‘science.’ It tells how most of it is done and why you shouldn’t believe most of what you read.

In a later chapter, she says what I’ve said a thousand times about carbs and saturated fats. But she says it much better. I wish I had written it like this.

We have very limited capacity to store carbohydrate as starch, so the liver converts any surplus carbohydrate we eat into saturated fat for easy storage. This bears repeating: if you eat more carbohydrate than you can burn right away or store as starch, your liver will turn it into saturated fat, not unsaturated fat, because saturated fat is the most compact and practical way to store energy. It stands to reason that if saturated fat were inherently bad for us, the body wouldn’t be designed to do this. [My bold]

In fact, I’m going to co-op it for Protein Power 2.0. With full attribution, of course.

Give her book a whirl. It is terrific. She is terrific.

Speaking of elite university trained…

Troubled: The Amazing Life of Rob Henderson

I can’t remember how I stumbled onto Rob Henderson, but I did so several years ago. I began reading his blog when it was a blog, then switched to his Substack when he moved to that platform. 

If you don’t know of him, all I can say is you should, because he has led an interesting life. I’ll summarize it briefly.

He was born to a Korean mother who had no idea who his father was. She was a drug addict, and Rob was taken away from her and put in the foster-care system when he was three years old. For the next half dozen years or so, he was passed around from one foster family to another in the greater Los Angeles area. Never able to settle in; never knowing when the social worker was going to stop by, pick him up, and drop him off at yet another unfamiliar foster home.

When he was about nine, a family adopted him. And he was thrilled. His adoptive mother was Asian, and she, herself, had been adopted by an American family. His adoptive father, whom he came to love dearly, was white. When he settled in with his adoptive family, he got birthday presents on his birthday for the first time in his life. Same with Christmas presents. He finally had found a place where people loved him. His father was a truck driver, who spent a summer with Rob riding with him on the road.

Then their parents informed Rob and his younger sister that they, the parents, were divorcing. As it turned out, Rob’s adoptive mother decided she was a lesbian. Rob’s adoptive father was not happy about this revelation. He knew Rob loved him, so to hurt Rob’s mother, his father refused to have anything to do with Rob. Which devastated him. He thought he had found a family, then this.

Soon his adoptive mother had a lesbian lover move in with her. During the next few years, Rob’s life deteriorated. He began smoking, drinking, cutting school, using drugs, and in general becoming a total delinquent.

His only saving grace, which he doesn’t make as much of in his book as he should, was that he liked to read. Despite that, he barely made it through high school with grades just above passing. He realized he was on a downhill slide, so based on the advice of a counselor, he decided to enlist in the Air Force. He took the military placement exam after being up all night smoking, drinking, and chugging Red Bull. He basically just didn’t give a flip.

He scored extremely well. He made it through Basic Training and was told that based on his test scores he could basically have his choice of jobs and would be promoted quickly. He took to the military life, but he still had a major drinking problem. He ended up in rehab, but stayed in the service. As the end of his second enlistment approached, he saw a flyer about a program for people in the military who wanted to go to college. He applied and was accepted.

He went to the program and was tutored by a handful of Ivy League uni students. They suggested he apply. So he did. And ended up being accepted into Yale. Which is not an easy place to get into. Especially, as it has turned out, if you’re Asian.

He went through Yale, then applied for a scholarship at Cambridge University in England to get a PhD in psychology. Which he did. He is now graduated and has written a book about his life.

The book is outstanding. I read it in almost a single sitting.

I had communicated back and forth with him a few times over things he had written in his blog. A friend of mine who knows him suggested he send me a galley copy of his book, which he did. And that’s what I read.

The first part of it is the set up for all of his insights into life and his development of his luxury beliefs construction.

Once he was adopted, he spent the rest of his life before the Air Force in the little town of Red Bluff, which is a couple of hours north of Sacramento, CA.  It’s a dinky town, but a little larger than the one I grew up in in the Ozarks. The difference between the two is stunning.

In the town I grew up in everyone was married. There were no kids I knew of born out of wedlock. No single mothers. Everyone I knew had a mother and a father. No one did any drugs. It was small town life as it used to be..

To this day, I don’t know anyone personally who died of a drug overdose. I know a couple of people peripherally who went to prison, but for white collar crimes.

In the town Rob grew up in, almost every kid was from a broken home. Drug use was rampant. From my small town perspective, what Rob grew up in is totally dystopian. It’s unbelievable to anyone from my generation, who grew up in a small town anywhere in America.

When I see the stats that over 100,000 of our fellow citizens die annually from drug overdoses, I think of crack houses and opium dens. But after reading Rob’s book, I can easily see how it happens. Life at the bottom sucks.

Rob’s book really shows the difference between the two extremes of the lives of graduates of elite colleges and those living in small town, blue collar America today.

His descriptions of his interactions with his fellow students were stunning. He came from one world, while they came from another vastly different one. Which is how he came up with the idea of luxury beliefs.

For example, he recounts how he had discussions with fellow students about the validity of marriage and a two parent home. They all said that marriage was overrated and that people should be able to live with whomever they wanted whenever they wanted. But when he asked them what kind of family they came from, they all replied that they came from intact two-parent homes. When he asked them if they planned on marrying, they all said yes.

So, their behavior was in contrast to what they recommend to others. If, in the event, they decided to live an alternative lifestyle, they would have the contacts and affluence to deal with it. Not so for a blue collar worker living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck in Red Bluff, CA.

These luxury beliefs are those held by the elite, which are damaging to the non-elite.

Another one is the entire ‘defund the police’ movement. It doesn’t much matter to the elites if the police are defunded. They have security systems in their homes. And walls. And electric fences. And promoting defunding the police is an acceptable and even a virtue-signaling behavior of the elite. But it is totally harmful to the lower classes.

The last part of the book is a dazzling display of hard thinking about the difference in classes and how the beliefs of the elites are so horribly harmful to those who are at the lower rungs of financial life.

Troubled is a tremendous book that is a total eye-opener for anyone who reads it.

It has my strongest recommendation.

Please, if you have any interest, pre-order it. It comes out next week on Feb 20. The promotion of a book largely depends on the number of pre-orders. This is really an important book that needs a wide readership. Pre-orders will help tremendously. Here is the link to pre-order.

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Odds and Ends

• Mutant wolves roaming Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have developed cancer-resilient abilities.

• An incredible illusion. If anyone knows how this is done, let me know in the comments. (I think I may have figured it out.)

• Wild animals are just that. Even if raised from birth by humans. Ignore that fact at your peril. This guy did and paid for it. I’ve got to say, though, that wart hog is my absolute favorite meat to eat. It is delicious.

• At trendy Japanese cafés, customers enjoy cuddling with pigs. Domestic pigs, not warthogs.

• Virginia teen with server that ‘would rival the NSA' pleads guilty in swatting calls case.

• New DOJ watchdog report details FBI officials' misconduct with foreign prostitutes. I thought these guys were supposed to be squeaky clean.

• Great, great story. Retired Canadian doc buys annotated ancient book for $10K. Discovers the annotations are by Vesalius, the father of anatomy. Sells it for $2.2M.

• Scientists find an intact 1,700 year-old chicken egg in Roman Britain. Wow!

• What if we killed every mosquito on earth? I don’t know, but I would love to find out. The procedure described in this video is ripe for the law of unintended consequences to rear its often ugly head.

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  Video of the Week

  Okay, I’ve got a good one this week. This one is a blast from the past. It’s JFK brutally making his displeasure known to an underling. A general, no less. It’s a beautiful thing to hear. It might be nice to think it’s because JFK was worried about the ostentatious spending, but more likely it was the optics of the thing, which were execrable. In any case, it’s a fun listen. And fun to hear the general, whom I’m sure had oft berated many below him, take his medicine.

Time for the poll. I’m running late, so I don’t have time to come up with any clever titles, so it’s stars today.

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

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