I'm Not a Pastor, But I Play One On This Blog

Good news for you young men (and women) thinking about becoming a pastor.

Old People Aren't Holy

Matter of fact a lot of them are mean, selfish people.

Again, I have no problems cutting Medicare and Social Security.

None.

Enjoy the alone time in the cheap nursing home.

Ketone and Fat "Burning" are Not the Same Thing to Your Mitochondria

This notion of being a "sugar burner" vs. a "fat burner" -- with the latter being touted as preferable based on nothing I've seen in the scientific literature -- is getting really out of hand.  This is not a new idea, but it certainly seems to be being pushed more lately, particularly in the area of athletic performance.  There were a smattering of posts about the diets of Olympians about the net and I just have to shake my head at the one that goes something like "just imagine how much better fill in the blank would do if (s)he didn't eat grains" or "ate LCHF" or "went paleo".  C'mon already ... Michael Phelps is a prime offender of all laws and gods nutritional, but will someone please remind me how many medals he's earned and records he's held/broken in his career?  Gawd forbid any of these elite athletes set a bad example by having their face put on a box of Wheaties!  I dunno ... it all seems so silly when Phelps sports one of the leanest torsos on the planet burning sugar.  But I digress ...

But with ketomania in full-blown fad form, there's a new twist on the fat burning meme which is to confuse fat burning with ketone burning.  It is not.  Yes, ketones are produced mostly from the breakdown of fatty acids (they are also produced from some amino acids), so you "burn fat" in your liver to produce them.  If you are in caloric deficit, the source of the fatty acids will be body fat.  However, if you're fueling the other cells of your body with ketones, this is not the same as the mitochondria in those cells "burning fat".  

Below is a schematic of a brain cell mitochondria and the metabolic pathways showing where ketones feed into Krebs (aka the TCA), from:  D-β-Hydroxybutyrate protects neurons in models of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease (thus it shows the points of issue for these two diseases) 

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From Your Captain in the Field

Suffering the decline, as always.

The BE&HM Series ~ Part III: The Main Group Elements, The Octet Rule and Ions

In the previous part of this series, Atoms & The Periodic Table, I went into how the structure of atoms is related to the construction of the Periodic Table of elements.  Some take home points:

• The mass of an atom is highly concentrated in the central nucleus made up of protons and neutrons
• The volume of an atom is determined by the space "swept out" by the essentially massless electrons orbiting the nucleus.

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Why America Needs Sun Jifa

Something tells me he didn't major in sociology or whyminz studeez.

But, you know, he didn't build that.

Liberals Feeding on Liberals

If there is one thing conservatives, libertarians, capitalists and other people that just fall under the general category of "self-reliant individuals" can smile about is how Minneapolis liberal property owners keep sticking it to themselves.


If you want to see something funny, go to a coffee shop or Sebastian Joe's ice cream and listen to the elite/upper income/trust fund liberals complain about property taxes and then within 2 minutes start complaining about how there isn't enough money being spent on "X" socialist cause.