WELL, HOW MUCH THE GLP-1 DERIVED WEIGHT LOSS IMPROVES HEALTH DEPENDS ON SIDE EFFECTS: Weight loss may bring big healthcare savings to Americans.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
December 8, 2024
ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH, A FLASHBACK: John Lennon was a secret Republican, former assistant says. “The singer’s former assistant claims in a new documentary that Lennon was a Ronald Reagan fan and a conservative at the time of his death.”
Plus: “I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who’s an old-time communist… He enjoyed really provoking my uncle… Maybe he was being provocative… but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism. . . He was a very different person back in 1979 and ’80 than he’d been when he wrote ‘Imagine.’ By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete.”
Well, it was George Harrison who wrote Taxman.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Trump ‘danger to everyone’ UW-Madison LGBT scholars say.
THIS BOOK IS BY MY FORMER STUDENT, NATHAN CANESTARO:
And here is your new fav WW2 Pacific book https://t.co/mA4UUxN5Mr
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) December 7, 2024
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY:
The people who turned the US military into a social laboratory for “transgender rights”, “racial equity”, abortion advocacy and climate change want you to know that Hegseth is too dangerous to lead it because he’s a Christian
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) December 7, 2024
Related:
The people who ran Kamala Harris for President and had Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House are suddenly very very concerned about officials drinking
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) December 7, 2024
Plus:
IMPORTANT: 46 Republican Senators voted to put DEI Darth Vader in charge of our Military
This man turned the Pentagon into a woke activist liberal arts laughingstock and started multiple unwinnable wars.
The GOP Senate have absolutely NO ground to sabotage Trump’s SecDef pick. pic.twitter.com/D8RusYrMgb
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 7, 2024
PRETTY MUCH:
"I'm leaving twitter, this place is too toxic and crazy"
*signs up for Assassination Circle Jerk dot com*
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 5, 2024
By the way the evil oligarch whose hit she's celebrating grew up in the pampered billionaire farmer gated enclave of Jewell, Iowa (pop. 1000) where he attended the exclusive toney prep school South Hamilton County High and later the University of Iowa
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 6, 2024
MARK JUDGE: Conservatives Can Curate Art for Themselves. “Does Philip Kennicott know what year it is? The Washington Post arts critic just published an essay that seems to have arrived in a time portal from 1986.”
OBAMA WAS A FAILURE. AND HIS INTENTIONS WERE SO BAD THAT IT’S REALLY GOOD THAT HE FAILED.
What's the point of having a black president if he doesn't tell the country the truth about race? Obama could have done that. He could be doing it now. Instead, he's cashing in. @benshapiro pic.twitter.com/BnETEZzwh8
— Glenn Loury (@GlennLoury) December 8, 2024
TRUE: The Democrats have become the Party of feminine cruelty. “That a lot of modern left-progressivism is strongly female—even apart from the gender gap in voting—is something many folk have observed. Josh Slocum has drawn attention to how much modern left-progressivism is built around the identifiable archetype of the scold or nag.”
Being a “common scold” who produced disturbance and dissension in a community was a crime at one time.
Related:
The only way these harpies win is if we let them. Never give up your guns. https://t.co/pCoUSNudds
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) December 7, 2024
December 7, 2024
VICTORY GIRLS: Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day: Only The Teenagers Are Left.
If you’re looking for a great WWII history read, let me recommend my former student Nathan Canestaro’s The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay.
UPDATE: From the open thread:
OPEN THREAD: It’s a glamour profession. A blogging obsession.
SPACE POLICY IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION:
The incoming Trump administration has offered few statements about its plans for NASA or Defense Department space programs in the two weeks since the election. That includes not announcing an official “agency review team” for NASA, the members of the transition team who come into the agency to learn about its activities and, in some cases, identify problems.
“The job of the teams coming in, first of all, is just to get a sense about where the agencies are,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, who served on the NASA transition team for incoming president George W. Bush. “Part of what you’re trying to do is figure out what are going to be some of the immediate landmines that are going to come up in the first six months. Political people hate surprises.”
An example of that, he noted, was the discovery during the Bush transition that the space station program was $4.8 billion over budget. “So, at 11 o’clock at night, I go over to the OMB team and say, ‘Hi, I’m Scott. I’m from the NASA team. Got a spare $4.8 bil? We’re a little short,’” he recalled during a panel discussion Nov. 12 at the Beyond Earth Symposium in Washington.
A similar landmine may be persistent air leaks in a Russian module of the ISS. At a Nov. 13 meeting of the ISS Advisory Committee, Bob Cabana, the new chair of the committee, noted disagreements between Russian and American officials on the cause and severity of the leaks. “The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the U.S. believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove to the Russians’ satisfaction that that’s the case,” Cabana said.
“I certainly believe that NASA is paying a lot of attention to it,” Pace said of those air leaks, “but if I was an incoming transition person, I would want to do my own forensics on that and understand very deeply what was going on because nothing will ratchet to the top of a list faster than anything involving human spaceflight safety.”
Pace said he didn’t see a problem with Musk pursuing Starship launches to Mars. “If you want to put a couple Starships on the surface of Mars, I think that is eminently doable and would be inspiring and interesting,” he said. “I’m not so sure about putting people on those missions because I think a lot of other things would have to happen first.”
Some, though, are worried that this strategy might be done at the expense of the current Artemis lunar exploration campaign.
I’m not so much worried about that as hopeful. Artemis, as it stands now, is mostly a jobs program for contractors, with deadlines being pushed back approximately 12 months every year.
I BRIEFLY TOOK LEUCINE AS A BODYBUILDING SUPPLEMENT. I GUESS MAYBE IT’S GOOD I STOPPED! Cutting Back on One Amino Acid Increases Lifespan in Middle-Aged Mice Up to 33%. “Our cells can’t produce isoleucine from scratch – we have to get it from foods such as soy protein.”
ALSO HEZBOLLAH. I’M HEARING THAT ISRAEL IS STRIKING HEZBOLLAH CONVOYS FLEEING TO LEBANON. Iran Bugging Out of Syria.
NOTE TO ALL THE JOURNALISTS WHO ARE CHEERING THE ASSASSINATION OF A HEALTHCARE CEO: Your industry is hated by millions and millions of people too. Just sayin’.
UPDATE:
Remember that time everybody dogpiled @tedcruz for pointing out that New York City has dog shit values? https://t.co/usfraOqDn3
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) December 7, 2024
HOPEFULLY THEY DON’T CATCH FIRE, EITHER: Carbon Nanotubes Store Triple the Energy of Lithium Batteries.
Related: Eric S. Raymond on Gramscian Damage. “As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom.”
MY OLD BENZ SUV HAD THESE AND THEY SUCKED, SO I DON’T BLAME HIM: Dump the Dubs? Why I Decided to Ditch 20-Inch Wheels. “The handsome 20-inch AMG wheels and low-profile tires that adorned my 2021 Mercedes-Benz E220d wagon are gone. In their place are Mercedes-Benz original equipment 18-inch wheels wrapped in comfy 45-series rubber. Time to hand in my car guy card? Not so fast. After four ruined tires and two cracked rims—$4,600 worth of damage in less than 10 months—it was time to dump the dubs.”
My story was nearly as bad. I had 6 flat tires in two years — one from a golf-ball-sized rock that was slightly sharp on one end — after not having a flat in decades, and I couldn’t get anything better. The tire-store guy told me that this was a common problem with the low-rolling-resistance eco tires that came with the vehicle, and that nothing else you could put on it would do much better. Now I have an SUV with big, honking all-terrain tires with heavy tread and everything is fine.
YOU CAN’T “BUY BACK” WHAT WAS NEVER YOURS: This is What Tyranny Looks Like: Canada to ‘Buy Back’ Semi-Auto Guns, Donate Them to Ukraine.