The Arrow #99
Hello friends.
Greetings from Fayetteville, Arkansas
And a Happy Thanksgiving to all.
MD and I drove up from Dallas a few days ago and are hanging out with the fam. Two of the three sons have apartments up here. One even has two, so we’re holed up in his extra one. No Hogs home game this coming weekend, and most students have left for the holiday, so the town isn’t overrun with people. If you’ve never been to Fayetteville, Arkansas, you should give it a try sometime. Beautiful little town nestled in the mountains.
I hope you get what I want you to get in this edition of The Arrow, but which I mean that it comes out the way I formatted it. Unlike other platforms, there are very few changes one can make on Substack. And this is my second go at it, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve had all kinds of problems with the backend of their site. It’s doubtless due to my own incompetence, but annoying nevertheless. I emailed their help desk a few days ago and still haven’t heard back, so thus far, I’m on my own.
Here is a screen grab of what I’m seeing. I hope you’re seeing it like this, too.
I’ve made the background a sort of ivory color, which I think is easier on the eyes. On my eyes, at least. And I’m using a serif font. They have three different serif fonts available, and I think this one is the easiest to read. Especially on this background.
One of the things I wrote Substack about is my inability to get this font on the email version. Then I went back and looked at the 20 or so Substacks I subscribe to and found the email version of each on to be in sans serif font. (Serifs are the little wings that stick out on the ends of letters for those who may not know. Sans serif means ‘without’ the little serifs.) So, I’m assuming if you’re reading this in the email version instead of online, you’re getting it with sans serif font.
Having the comments section at the bottom is nice. I’ll try to interact as much as I can given my time constraints.
I had someone ask me in the comments to last week’s Arrow about resistant starch. For those who don’t know, resistant starch is starch that is supposedly resistant to digestion. It is thought to pass through the GI tract without being broken down into its glucose components and, as a result, doesn’t increase blood sugar and stimulate insulin release.
Probably the most common resistant starch is potato starch from cooked potatoes that are then left to cool overnight. When reheated, this newly resistant potato starch is thought not to run up blood sugar as does freshly cooked potato, which has a glycemic index of 82-85, depending upon whether the potato is boiled or mashed. Supposedly by allowing the potato to cool, then reheating it will reduce the glycemic index to ~40.
When I wore a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) for a couple of months, I meant to test potatoes that had cooled then been reheated, but I completely forgot to do it. Same with sour dough bread. It supposedly has a much lower propensity to run blood sugar up than does regular bread, but I forgot to try that as well. Both MD and I got another CGM that we’ll put on when we get home after this weekend. And I’ll try both the cooled/reheated potatoes and the sour dough bread.
I bring this up because during the Q&A after my talk at the We Love Our Heart conference this past weekend, someone asked about CGMs and a discussion ensued. At one point, someone asked me about resistant starch and CGM findings. I answered that I didn’t know, to which a number of folks in the audience opined that resistant starch elevated blood sugar just like non-resistant starch. So, take that for what it’s worth.
Both MD and I will give it a try in the near future. I will keep you posted.
Speaking of the We Love Our Heart conference, not only did Ivor Cummings ride herd on that meeting all weekend, he had to be ready to debate vegetarian Dr. Michael Gerger the next day on live TV. Here’s how it went:
And here is the Rumble link in case YouTube takes this video down for whatever reason.
You just never know about YouTube. They definitely fiddle with issues that aren’t political. A week or two ago, I put up a video from Brad Marshall showing what happens to seed and vegetable oils when they are left in a restaurant fryer for days and days. A couple of days ago, Brad tweeted that all of a sudden YouTube had quit promoting his video.
First I tweeted his video. The same one I put up in The Arrow.
A few days later, Brad put up this tweet.
Maybe it was me, because I’m always on the verge of cancellation by Twitter for my controversial vax stance. Who knows? But for whatever reason, YouTube quit presenting his video.
Speaking of Twitter…
It’s been an interesting ride since Elon took over. First, I lost about 150 followers almost overnight, which I’m assuming was from the big liberal bail out once Musk took the reins. Then more followers come aboard and my count starts to edge back up till something else happens.
When Musk reinstated Trump, same thing. A bunch of followers vanished almost immediately. Then here come new followers and the count starts to climb. Then he reinstates Marjorie Taylor Greene, and away a bunch more go.
I’m wondering if a lot of these folks are going to be like CBS. CBS left Twitter in a huff a couple of days ago when Trump got reinstated. Then, when no one gave a flip, CBS ignominiously slithered back on.
I’m really hoping Elon can make a go of it and turn it into a real public square, not the so-called public square it has been where only one side is heard.
I don’t think there’s a chance in hell for that to happen with YouTube. The folks who are the gatekeepers are totally off the deep end and in the tank for the Democrats. How do I know?
Matt Taibbi, who is just about my favorite opinion writer (his Substack was the first one I signed up to pay for), wrote a piece this past week that shows just how in the tank YouTube is. What he details is almost unbelievable. Matt has made this column available to the public free, so take a look
Here is the substance of it.
An investigative video-journalist Taibbi works with put together a YouTube video that was a compilation of various Democrat politicians whining about the 2016 election being stolen. You can watch it below:
Then Matt Orfalea, the videographer, put together another video, also posted on YouTube, with alternating claims the election was stolen. Trump led off by saying if he didn’t win the election was rigged. Then Hilary Clinton said the same thing about the election she lost. Trump’s claims then alternated with Team Hilary’s for the rest of the video. You can watch it below:
Why is this one on Twitter and not YouTube? Well, unbelievably enough, YouTube took it down. And not only that, the minions at YouTube gave Matt Orfalea a strike, which put him two strikes away from being de-platformed. Since making videos for YouTube is his business, getting banned from the site would be the end of his business.
Here’s what Taibbi had to say about it.
YouTube initially tried to demonetize both videos. After a fuss they reversed the decision about the first. Now they’ve taken a more drastic step, not only deleting the second video but two earlier rough-cut versions that were never even shown to the public but lived on his site. (This is another mad feature of the content moderation era: you can be censored and punished for pre-publication thinking). They also gave Orfalea a strike, leaving him two away from being removed from the site, which would essentially put him out of business.
I can sort of understand it if they removed both. But, ultimately, they didn’t. They left the one of the Democrats crying foul and removed the second one showing both sides claiming fraud. And rebuked the videographer for the second.
Does this seem right to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.
Taibbi, who has a huge readership is going to keep pushing till YouTube relents and restores the video and removes the black mark against Orfalea. I’m not holding my breath as the arrogance of these people working in Big Tech knows no bounds. Here is his latest. After detailing a handful of other outrages, Taibbi writes:
YouTube has become a place that censors true content but traffics in official and quasi-official deceptions. It’s become indistinguishable from a state censorship bureau. If they feel they’re right about their decisions, they should be happy to explain themselves to people [like] me. Until then, they can expect more love letters from this address.
Subscribers should know I don’t believe in letting things like this go, but I also don’t believe in annoying faithful readers. In the future, if there are similar entries in this campaign, I’ll make them public but won’t clog your email with notices. The idea is to be a pain in Google’s backside, not yours.
Here is a pretty unbelievable admission from one who should know:
It would be nice if everyone—Democrats, Republicans, Independents, etc.—could be confidant that our voting process is valid and election counts are true and accurate. As it stands now, it seems the only people who believe in the integrity of the system are those who won a given election.
Vaccine Adverse Events
I almost never read comments on blogs and Substacks, but I know a lot of people do. And folks on my Substack are commenting instead of emailing, so I do read the comments here. But since I don’t usually read comments, I can only assume that others do the same. So when I get a comment that I think might be of interest to a number of readers, I’ll post it and discuss like I do with emails.
Here is such a comment:
I’ve been wondering about your golf cohort, you mentioned a while back that none of them have suffered vaccine injuries (or pre-mature death) yet almost all took the mRNA jab. I assume this is an extended set of males, not just a couple of foursomes. This week’s Arrow mentioned SADS as a new Medicare code, have you followed or read The Ethical Skeptic’s MMWR/CDC statistical analysis and what do you think of his data model? How does his work square with your golf game cohort? If excess deaths in the US is what he purports (he believes CDC assigns many of these to an acute COVID infection) why isn’t it showing up in our closest community acquaintances?
This reader is referring to something I’ve written about two or three times. I belong to a couple of golf clubs with a total membership of maybe 1100-1300. I don’t know everyone in these clubs, but I know plenty. And I would know if anyone had a vaccine issue. I think almost all the members are fully vaccinated. There are only a handful of us who are pure bloods.
Take a look at the short video below by Dr. Peter Doshi, editor of the British Medical Journal.
According to Dr. Doshi, there is an adverse event rate of 1 in 800 vaccinated subjects. This would mean that there should be one or more people in my golf clubs that should have experienced a serious adverse event. But there haven’t been any major ones that I know of, and if anyone had had, a serious event I probably would have heard. But the membership of these two golf clubs skews older, and the majority of the members are affluent and health conscious. There is almost no obesity. So the membership certainly does not mirror the US population. So it doesn’t surprise me that there hasn’t been a problem. Yet. And may never be. Time will tell.
As an aside…despite getting multiple vaccines, almost everyone I know at these clubs has gotten Covid.
I have not read The Ethical Skeptic’s analysis, so I can’t comment on it. From the tone of the comment above, I assume he is reporting a high level of excess deaths. He’s not the only one. Insurance companies have reported on excess deaths. Excess deaths are up almost everywhere. I would not be surprised to learn that the CDC is attributing many of these excess deaths to Covid. In fact, given their full bore promotion of the vaccines, I would expect nothing less of them.
In my view, the best thing one can do for oneself, vaccinated or unvaccinated, is to shed co-morbidities. Even the NYC data showed that elderly people without co-morbidities had minuscule death rates. And that was with the original strain of the Wuhan virus, when it was at its most virulent. I have not seen data on co-morbidities and deaths in the vaccinated, but I would bet they follow the same pattern as deaths in the unvaccinated. Other than the young athletes, of course. And what’s going on there needs to be carefully examined.
Underwriting the Trip on the Mayflower
Everyone knows the story of the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, the memory of which we in the United States celebrate today. Some know the history of the crossing on the Mayflower and the brutal days the Pilgrims endured on the US shore. But few know how a bunch of ne-er do well members of a religious sect got together the funds to hire a ship and crew to bring them to the New World. I, myself, had no idea until I read Americana, a wonderful book by, who else, an immigrant to the USA. It’s a book from which I learned many, many wonderful things, and I highly recommend it.
The Pilgrims were members of a separatist sect who had been run out of England in 1608. They went first to Amsterdam for a few years, then to Leyden. They were free of persecution by the Dutch, but their circumstances were fairly grim. But as a first hand account of their time there reported, they were pretty much restricted to work that involved “hard and continual labor,” primarily in the cloth-making business.
One of the reasons they immigrated to Holland in the first place—aside from the fact that due to their religious beliefs they were no longer welcome in England—was to attract new members to their church. Unfortunately for them, the opposite happened. As their children grew up during the more than a decade they lived there, many were attracted to the Dutch way of life and left the sect. As did some other adult members. So instead of growing, the sect was shrinking in number.
After much discussion and praying, the leaders determined that perhaps a trip to the New World would be in order. Members of the sect, who had been working hard, yet living hand to mouth, could end up with their own land and their own house, a prospect that was unthinkable where they were.
But how to finance it?
At the time, there were various “Adventure” investment groups—a prominent one being the Virginia Company of London—that would underwrite settlers to the New World in return for the labor they would provide there and the products they would send back. The settlers would end up not only with a trip over paid for, but also ownership of the property after a period of years of labor. The Virginia Company had sent some groups over, most of whom had ended up dying miserable deaths or vanishing to live with the Indians. The company had restructured multiple times and was in bad straits when approached by the Pilgrims.
There were numerous hurdles to be cleared before any deal could be done, not the least of which was getting permission from the Crown to move forward. Upon receiving this approval, the leaders of the Pilgrims went to London to began negotiating the final terms of the deal.
The shares were priced at ten pounds. The structure was similar to Virginia’s. A planter willing to go to the New World received one share; an adventurer willing to pay ten pounds received the same. The venture would hold all assets and economic rights in the settlement. At the end of seven years, the assets were to be distributed to the shareholders in proportion to their ownership.
But the devil was in the details. And the Merchant Adventurers changed the terms of the deal mere weeks from the proposed departure date. In the original terms, the Pilgrims were to have contributed four days per week of labor to the venture, with two days for their “private employment” and one day for the Sabbath. The investors now insisted all six days be committed to the venture’s interest. Adding insult to injury, the houses that the settlers were to build for their families were now to be added to the venture’s assets rather than owned by the individuals.
The Pilgrims were, of course, incensed at this change in the deal, but their agents had already accepted on their behalf. It was too late for them to back out, so they sucked up and moved forward.
After raising £1,200, the parties quickly moved to salting beef and procuring beer, water, and other provisions for the voyage. In Holland, with some of the shares sold within the community itself, the congregation bought a small ship called the Speedwell with a capacity of 60 tons, which was to be kept in the New World for coastal trading and fishing. In England a ship of 180 tons, the Mayflower, was being chartered.
Until I read Americana, I had never heard of the Speedwell or its part in the whole process.
After many tearful goodbyes, the Pilgrims boarded the Speedwell and made their way to Southhampton, England where the Mayflower awaited. But when the reality of leaving set in, the Pilgrims became agitated over the onerous terms to which they had been subjected, especially the requirement that they work six days out of each week instead of the four they had originally negotiated. And they were also pissed about the terms under which they were to contribute their individual houses to the common property. They became intransigent and refused to go unless they could come to better terms. Rightfully so, in my opinion.
The Pilgrims refused to regard the new conditions as binding even though their agents had agreed, The impasse continued for days. A final funding of £100 was due from [the investor group] to clear the ship from port and commence the voyage. [The investment group] refused to pay. The Pilgrims were left to sell three thousand pounds of butter, along with other sacrifices, to raise £60 quickly.
Obviously, some compromise was made, as the ships did indeed leave port. My one annoyance with the book is that it doesn’t spell out what the specifics of this compromise were. But the negotiations took so long and the departure was delayed such that the arrival in the New World came late and the Pilgrims had to contend with the approaching winter.
It didn’t help that the Speedwell began to leak and had to return to port. After a couple more starts and stops, the Pilgrims abandoned the porous Speedwell. A handful of its passengers said screw it, or the Pilgrim equivalent thereof, and quit the trip. The others boarded the Mayflower and the trip began in earnest.
On September 5, with 102 passengers on board, the Mayflower started its journey to the New World. As much as the Pilgrims are recorded as religiously motivated, it should be noted that fully half of the Mayflower’s passengers were not members of the church in Leyden but rather settlers added to the journey by the investors.
Living in Holland with relative freedom, then sailing to the New World under an English flag, with English financing, on a chartered English vessel with an English crew—all this seems an especially unlikely way to flee English persecution. Political refugees generally do not spend the final days before departure negotiating financial considerations and distribution of assets seven years into the future. The the Pilgrims were never refugees to begin with: they were critical instruments in a speculative venture, one that equally served to expand the Crown’s sovereignty to the New World. Religious liberty was but one component of the overall enterprise.
Once the Pilgrims made shore in the New World, many hardships beset them. But that is the story we’re all familiar with. The story I’m familiar with at least. But it had never occurred to me how the Pilgrims might have gotten together the scratch to hire a ship and crew to make the crossing.
Don Surber, one of my favorite retired journalist writers, has a nice Substack piece on the Pilgrims plight after their arrival. Well worth reading.
I’ll leave you with a couple of quotes about the Pilgrims I picked up from Americana and Surber’s column. It’s about how the Pilgrims learned that communism sucked centuries before Marx wrote about it, and that the free enterprise system worked.
From Surber, who quotes author Michael Franc:
“The colony's leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford [the governor] called ‘communism.’ Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (‘taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealth’) bred ‘confusion and discontent’ and ‘retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers'] benefit and comfort.’”
That didn’t work. There was a famine that nearly wiped the Pilgrims out in 1623 — two years after the first Thanksgiving. So the Pilgrims decided to divvy up the land. This provided the incentive to farm. They flourished.
Franc wrote, “A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims' economic recovery. Their success, he observed, ‘may well evince the vanity of that conceit...that the taking away of property... would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.’ Bradford surmised, ‘God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.’”
The set up in the New World was that farming was a communal undertaking. An undertaking that, as all the countries under communism eventually learn, does not bode well for productivity. In theory it seems to work; the reality is the opposite. Things were going so poorly for the Pilgrims in terms of quantity of harvest that something had to change, or they were all going to perish.
However, the shortages caused by the all-for-one, one-for-all ethos of collective farming proved inadequate. After much debate, it was decreed that all families would be allotted a portion of land to grow their own crops, with the product of their efforts their own to keep. “This had very good success,” wrote the colony’s governor, “for it made all hands very industrious. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability.” The experimental form of communism, when it came to growing food at least, ended for the Pilgrims. [My bold]
The Pilgrims discovered for centuries ago what has to continue being discovered by country after country in the years since. It is strange to me that each generation seems to be beguiled by the same system the Pilgrims suffered under and finally ditched. It’s a powerful, but totally faulty, idea.
Dr. John Campbell and Dr. Aseem Malhotra
While you’re kicking back trying to avoid succumbing to your turkey tryptophan overload, take a look at this video of a discussion between John Campbell and Aseem Malhotra. A lot of compelling information. It’s been interesting to watch John Campbell’s migration from all-in on the Covid vaccines to vaccine hesitancy. Aseem certainly helps him along.
This is a major issue with Campbell as he makes quite a good living from his YouTube videos, all of which could be taken down in a heartbeat. That would be a major demonetization. He’s a brave man.
No Low-Carb Studies Today
I’m sure the last thing most of us want to do today while wallowing in post Thanksgiving dinner gastric malaise is read about any studies showing the benefit of low-carb dieting on health and weight loss. I haven’t had TG dinner yet as I write these words—in fact, 'I’m fasting all day in preparation—so it doesn’t affect me. But I’ll give you a break. I’ve been reviewing a number of them that I’ll go over in detail in future Arrows, but not today. But, spoiler alert, they all show low-carb/ketogenic is the way to go to maximize metabolic health.
I was tempted to write about a study showing how weakness and sarcopenia (muscle loss) are the new smoking, but my own Thanksgiving dinner is looming and you’re probably tired of reading. So, I’ll leave that one, too, for a later day.
A Thanksgiving Tradition
I would be remiss if I ended this edition of The Arrow on this particular day without a mention of one of our Eades family traditions. Here it is. Give it a listen.
If you’re not familiar with this song, don’t feel bad. A lot of people not of my generation aren’t either. It’s a Viet Nam war protest and draft protest song from the 1960s. If it were recorded today in its original form, Arlo Guthrie would have been canceled in a heart beat. I mean a song about desecrating the environment by dumping garbage down the side of a beautiful hill, using homophobic slurs, and parodying mentally-challenged people (as they’re called today) would not fly. The only thing that would fly is the anti-police bias in the song.
Both MD and I and our children have listened to this song so many times, we could all recite it. I can play it on the guitar—though not nearly so well as Arlo. So I just assumed everyone was familiar with it. And I made an allusion to it during a business meeting with millennials once, and was in disbelief that they had no clue as to what I was talking about. (Their cultural education is sadly lacking!) I wrote about the experience here.
I hope everyone has a Thanksgiving dinner that can’t be beat.
I’ll be back next Thursday with another edition. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll see you then.
P.S. One of my other issues with Substack is that, unlike ConvertKit, they don’t give me a running word count, so I have no clue as to where I am with that. I suppose I would be more correct in saying that if there is a place they list the word count, I can’t find it. But I did get this popup, so I’m close to my limit.
Don’t forget The Arrow’s sponsors:
I really love the Substack writings of Midwestern Doctor. Very intelligent and easy to read.
My husband and I just finished listening to Alice's Restaurant. Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving!