Last night, I read the entirety of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. It's a novel told in the form of letters written by a demon to another demon instructing him on ways to manipulate his "patient" to do evil.
This one quote sounded familiar.
Nick Norwitz Reveals Why High Cholesterol Doesn't Cause Heart Disease
In this episode of Stay Off My Operating Table, @nicknorwitz breaks down why the medical world has been treating cholesterol as the disease itself and why that's dead wrong. One extraordinary case of a patient with sky-high LDL and zero arterial plaque is challenging the entire conventional model of heart disease. If you think managing your cholesterol numbers means you're managing your heart health, this conversation will change the way you think.
Watch the full episode here 👉 https://t.co/pcxDkyzj5F
#CholesterolMyths #HeartHealth #LDLCholesterol #CardiovascularHealth #FunctionalMedicine
After Appomattox, Robert E. Lee tried to go home. He couldn't.
While he was off losing the war, a Union quartermaster general named Montgomery Meigs, a Southerner by birth who had stayed loyal to the Union and personally despised Lee after losing his own son in combat, seized Arlington estate over $92.07 in unpaid property taxes. (Mrs. Lee had actually sent an agent to pay. The agent was refused at the door.) Meigs then did something brilliantly cruel. He ordered Union dead buried as close to the front porch as possible. The point wasn't burial space. The point was making the house unlivable for the Lees forever.
It worked. That front yard is now Arlington National Cemetery.
So Lee, the most famous man in the South, drifted. Lived in a rented house in Richmond. Hid out at a friend's cottage in the country. In June 1865 he wrote to President Andrew Johnson asking for his citizenship back. Ulysses S. Grant personally endorsed the application. On October 2, 1865, Lee signed the required Oath of Allegiance and sent it to Washington.
A State Department clerk filed it in the wrong folder.
Lee never knew. He spent his last five years as president of tiny, broke Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, where he created the country's first college journalism program, one of the first college business programs, and a one-sentence honor code ("every student be a gentleman") that still runs the place. In public he preached reconciliation. In private, asked to denounce the Klan, he refused. Testifying to Congress in 1866, he said it would be better for Virginia "if she could get rid of" its Black population.
He died on October 12, 1870, of a stroke. Officially, still not a U.S. citizen.
His son sued for Arlington and won. U.S. Supreme Court, 5 to 4, in 1882. The family took $150,000 in 1883 and let the graves stay.
The lost oath sat in a drawer for 105 years. An archivist stumbled across it in the National Archives in 1970. Five years later, on August 5, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed a joint resolution restoring Robert E. Lee's U.S. citizenship, retroactive to June 13, 1865.
By then, the man had been dead for 105 years, buried beneath a chapel he built himself, in a Virginia mountain town nobody outside the state could find on a map.
"Doctors versus Influencers"
I spend a lot of time in both traditional academia and social media, and over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern:
The academics, whether physicians or scientists, who spend the most time complaining about "influencers" online are often the very people transparently trying to become influencers themselves… just unsuccessfully.
Because the reality is, “influencer” is basically what every doctor and scientist ultimately aspires to be.
The entire job is influencing: influencing minds, influencing patients, influencing research, influencing public discourse.
That’s the whole game. Nobody wants to be a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear them.
This is why I find it almost comical when “influencer” gets deployed as a slur.
It feels like some exaggerated version of: “Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.”
Or like an out-of-shape fan screaming from the sidelines at professional athletes about how to do their job.
My advice?
If you want to influence people, do it well.
Be persuasive. Be compelling. Of course, all while being honest, rigorous, and authentically trying to make a positive impact. Nevertheless, be engaging. It's necessary if you want to change minds.
And if you want to try to leverage your credentials strategically, go for it. That's your earned advantage, as an aspiring influencer, I suppose.
But don’t pretend you’re inherently more deserving of attention and clout simply because somebody once handed you a credential and told you it entitled you to a bigger megaphone.
- Dr Nick Norwitz MD, PhD, "Influencer Bro" 🤷♂️
🚨New Paper: "Seven Years of 700 Cholesterol Without Coronary Atherosclerosis: A Lean Mass Hyper-Responder Case Report"
Link: https://t.co/5VnRpZlFdR
For the past 7 years, I’ve been running what is essentially a natural experiment in cholesterol and heart health.
During that time, I’ve largely lived with:
👉Total cholesterol around 700 mg/dl
👉LDL cholesterol between 500–600 mg/dL
I recently underwent advanced coronary CT angiography imaging with AI-guided analysis. This is not a CAC. It measures all plaque (soft + calcified), with expert interpretation and AI-guided analysis capable of quantifying plaque down to the cubic millimeter (mm3).
Now, to address the obvious question:
Am I too young for plaque?
In brief: No.
The clearest comparison is individuals with homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, who often have similarly extreme LDL/ApoB levels and can develop advanced plaque as toddlers, and even heart attacks as early as age 8.
Also, nutrition influencers in their 30s have publicly shared quantified plaque scores from these same imaging technologies. In one recent case, a plant-based influencer in his thirties was found to have 61.3 mm³ of plaque despite having far lower lifetime LDL exposure. (He can identify himself if he so chooses.)
My case also isn’t a one-off.
There are many individuals like me, including older individuals with similar LDL-C and ApoB without any plaque.
The difference is that I’m an unusually well-characterized subject, with extensive metabolic data and health markers tracked over time. You can learn more at the newsletter or open-access paper, linked above.
The science of heart health is not settled. And cholesterol is not a simple story.
🚨 If you want to help spread the word...
Quote Tweet this post (or create an original post) including the article link with a thought. Academic papers are increasingly evaluated using attention metrics. Original posts from unique users are one way to increase these metrics and help ultimately increase its reach.
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From our country’s beginning, for as long as America has embodied freedom and exceptionalism, the soul of our nation has been rooted in the Christian faith.
Today we gather, as our forefathers did on this day centuries ago, to rededicate our nation to God.
@pureMetatron I really appreciate the spirit of this...the Christian faith isn’t threatened by any “disclosure.” Jesus is still Lord.
But I think the Bible gives us a more precise way to think about this than just “demons in disguise” or “God created aliens on other planets.”
Michael Heiser (in The Unseen Realm) helped recover what the biblical authors actually believed about the cosmos. The Bible doesn’t speak of “aliens” in the modern sense. Instead, it describes a very active unseen realm full of created beings who are not human:
• The sons of God (bene elohim)
• Principalities and powers
• Cherubim, seraphim, ophanim
• The Watchers who rebelled at Mount Hermon
These beings were created by God, they have free will, and some of them have rebelled (just like humans did). The “demons” we see in the Gospels are largely the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim — the hybrid offspring of the Watchers and human women. So yes, some phenomena could be deceptive manifestations from that realm.
But the bigger picture is this: God already populated the universe. He filled it with intelligent, non-human beings who have been interacting with humanity since the beginning. The “space” and “celestial bodies” aren’t empty — they reflect the vastness of God’s created order and the scope of the spiritual war that’s been raging since Eden.
The real question isn’t “Are there aliens?”
The real question is: Do we understand the biblical categories for the beings that already exist in the unseen realm?
When we recover that worldview (the Divine Council, the three rebellions, and Christ’s victory over all of them), we don’t have to guess between “demons” or “friendly aliens.” We already have the map — and it’s far more coherent and hopeful than either modern option.
Jesus didn’t just die for humans. He was exalted “far above all principality and power and might and dominion” (Ephesians 1:21). Every created being — visible or invisible — is under His lordship.
That’s the peace we have, no matter what any government releases.
Even if the White House released a public statement tomorrow saying aliens exist and they have proof, it would not challenge the Christian faith at all.
Two possibilities.
1 - They are demons in disguise.
2 - They were also created by God.
I lean towards the second one because I think it makes sense that God created an entire universe and then he would populate it.
Why so much space and celestial bodies just to populate a single planet?
What do you think?
@AHomelyHouse
The “pseudo-religious alien hype” does often come from our modern ignorance of the unseen realm. But the folklore you mentioned (mound dwellers, aerial hosts, elf-shot, faerie abductions) isn’t random superstition. Much of European folklore is folk memory of the very real spiritual beings the Bible describes.
Those “airy hosts” and “faerie hosts” line up strikingly with the biblical categories:
• The Watchers (bene elohim / sons of God) who descended at Mount Hermon (Genesis 6 + 1 Enoch)
• Their hybrid offspring, the Nephilim — whose disembodied spirits became the demons that still roam the earth seeking bodies
• The territorial powers and “princes” of the nations (Daniel 10, Deuteronomy 32:8) — the same entities Paul calls “principalities and powers”
These beings have been interacting with humanity for millennia. The abductions, the mistreatment of livestock, the boundary-crossing, it all fits the pattern of the three supernatural rebellions the Bible records (Eden, Hermon, and Babel).
So when people today report the same kinds of phenomena under new labels (“aliens,” “inter-dimensional beings,” “UFOs”), they’re often describing the same old spiritual realities — just dressed up in modern language.
The good news? Jesus has authority over every single one of them.
He didn’t come just to forgive sins. He came to reverse what the Watchers did at Hermon and to reclaim what the powers stole at Babel. That’s why Heiser titled his book Reversing Hermon.
We don’t have to be afraid of the folklore or the headlines. We just need to recover the biblical map of the unseen realm — and stand in the victory Christ already won.
The real ��disclosure” has already happened. It’s in the pages of Scripture.
I blame a lot of this kind of pseudo-religious alien hype on our ignorance of folklore. They're not civilizations from different planets; they've lived here with us since forever. They're the mound dwellers and the aerial hosts; they've been abducting people for millennia. Old Anglo-Saxon prayers against "elf-shot" were to defend against their mistreatment of livestock; the Gaelic prayer to St. Brigid has a stanza specifically to ward off abduction attempts: "...Nor seed of faerie host shall lift me, nor seed of airy host shall lift me, nor earthly beig destroy me."
Colossians 1:16 is beautiful and true. Christ is Lord over all things, visible and invisible. No question.
But let’s add a little more biblical precision from the worldview/the Divine Council / Unseen Realm framework).
When Paul lists “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers,” he’s not talking about modern categories like “aliens” or “little green men.” He’s using the language of the unseen realm, the same heavenly beings the Bible calls:
• “sons of God” (bene elohim)
• “principalities and powers” (archai and exousiai)
• The “princes” of the nations (Daniel 10)
• The Watchers (from 1 Enoch / Genesis 6)
These are the same divine beings who were allotted the nations after Babel (Deuteronomy 32:8 in the older reading) and who later rebelled and became corrupt (Psalm 82). Some of them , the Watchers, even left their proper domain, took human wives, and produced the Nephilim. Their disembodied spirits are the demons we see active in the Gospels.
So when we talk about “disclosure” and strange phenomena, the Bible doesn’t leave us guessing. It already has the categories:
• Some of what people are seeing may be loyal heavenly beings (like the Ophanim, cherubim, or other members of God’s council).
• Much of it is likely the ongoing activity of the rebellious powers — the lingering effects of the three supernatural rebellions (Eden, Hermon, and Babel).
The good news? Jesus has already defeated them all. He disarmed the rulers and authorities (Colossians 2:15), bound the strong man, and took back the authority that was stolen. That’s why Heiser titled his book Reversing Hermon,Jesus came specifically to undo what the Watchers did.
So yes, Christians have nothing to fear. But we also don’t need to flatten everything into “aliens.” The Bible gives us a much richer, more coherent, and more ancient map.
The real question isn’t “Are aliens real?”
The real question is: Do we understand the unseen realm the way the biblical authors did?
That’s the rabbit hole worth going down.
Remember this verse while everyone starts freaking out about disclosure.
“For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.” - Colossians 1:16
ALL THINGS
in heaven
and on earth
All means all. That means even “aliens” are under the lordship of Christ.
Christian, you have nothing to fear.
And the Word of God is true no matter what any government or scientist says.