Article here.

The GLP-1 medications (Ozempic, Mounjaro, etc.) are responsibility nearly two health care inflation points.

Plus:

“The Blue Cross Association released data showing that 30% of patients stopped treatment within four months, before reaching their targeted dose and in most cases, before any significant weight loss occurred, and less than half stayed on for the minimum recommended period of 12 weeks.”

Lots of side effects mean big expense and than lots of stopping.

As a pharmacist explained to me, the other problem with GLP-1 drugs is that people don’t lifestyle (nutrition intake, exercise) so you often end up with unhealthy thin people.

“MAGA Republicans are subjecting Vice President Kamala Harris to a barrage of racist and sexist attacks as she has stormed out in front as the likely 2024 nominee…GOP Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee said that “100 percent, she was a DEI hire” insisting of Biden’s choice of Harris: “When you go down that route, you get mediocrity.” — Rolling Stone, 7/22/24

With Joe Biden dropping out of the race, Vice President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party. As a conservative, it’s clear to me that Harris is a DEI hire who hasn’t earned the credentials necessary to be president. This is especially true compared to Donald Trump, who has never been handed anything in his life.

Donald Trump is nothing if not a self-made man. In 1966, Trump chose to transfer from Fordham University to the more prestigious Wharton School of Finance. He attended the transfer interview with his father, Fred Trump, by his side for support, the way any normal student would. And, though we have yet to see his grades, we can only assume they were stellar.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris did her undergraduate at Howard University, likely taking a spot from one of the millions of White and Asian students who apply to Howard every year.

After graduating, Donald Trump got his first job at Trump Management, his father’s real estate company. Nobody in their right mind could argue that Donald Trump got that job as part of a “diversity initiative” or “underrepresented talent incubator.” He then started several businesses with nothing more than a dream and a few small loans from his father. And he led six of those businesses all the way from start to finish. Donald Trump is the candidate with the most experience seeing ideas all the way through to the end, whether it’s a casino or American democracy.

Kamala Harris was seemingly plucked out of obscurity for the VP pick in 2020. Her only prior experience in public service was as the District Attorney of San Francisco, the Attorney General of California, and as a United States Senator. And the only reason she got the job was because 81 million people mistakenly believed she was qualified.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, earned the presidency in 2016 by getting the second-most votes out of any of the candidates in contention. It’s a good thing the electoral college was structured in a way that Hillary Clinton couldn’t be handed the presidency simply because she was a woman.

DEI is running amok in this country. White men make up around 31 percent of the United States population, yet make up only 55 percent of Fortune 500 corporate board seats and hold only 62 percent of elected offices. The presidency is one of the few occupations that has remained (mostly) untainted from diversity hires. And after a brief period in which white men made up only 97.73 percent of United States presidents, it’s good to see that number has climbed back up to 97.83 percent. A drop down to 95.74 percent would be nothing short of catastrophic. We cannot afford to repeat the mistake of electing woefully unqualified candidates like Barack Obama rather than people who earned it by making a name for themselves, like George W. Bush.

Between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, it’s clear who has benefitted the most from their race and gender. And the American people deserve a president who hasn’t gained massive advantages in life from policies that gave preference to one group of people over another.

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I can’t believe you’ve never heard this album before. Dal Snagwood is one of the foundational comedians of the 1970s. He was so smart and incisive—almost more like a philosopher. Every comic from the ’90s says that this is the one that inspired them to try it, and those guys are usually right about everything. I’ll put it on right now.

This first track is my favorite. It’s so good. Now, to understand it, it helps to know that Chumpy Chuckers was a candy bar from the ’70s, because he’s going to be talking about them for the next ten minutes or so.

No, they stopped making them sometime around 1982 or 1983, so I don’t think that anyone has ever eaten one in my lifetime. I remember a school teacher sang the jingle once when I was in the third grade, but otherwise, I have never heard of it.

Yeah, I looked Chumpy Chuckers up after I listened to this track for the first time. Oh, hang on, this part is great—he sounds just like the commercial. All that back and forth about, “Why don’t they make a candy bar with peanuts and pretzels?” and the “Gee, Einstein, I don’t know!” Ha ha ha. Oh, but that part when he was cursing and pretending to beat up the cartoon characters from the commercial was all made up. That was, like, his take on it.

I looked up the commercial, too, so I know what it was. Let’s watch it later; I don’t want to slow down his momentum.

Yeah, that commercial must have been on all the time. Do you hear how the audience is laughing hysterically once he makes that slide whistle noise? That’s how the commercial jingle begins. He’s singing the melody exactly, although, in the actual commercial, it’s played with a xylophone, not by hitting his hand on the mic for four minutes.

The real jingle doesn’t have that verse where he calls the consumers “dummies,” though, but it does have that chorus where it lists all the things the candy tastes like. See, but in the real one, they say like “pretzels” and “chocolate,” not “old tires” or “banana peels” or “raw sewage.” But it does end with the part where he sings, “And the cherry is the cherry on top.” And no, the original one doesn’t have the part with the singer rhyming “Chumpy Chuckers” like that. That’s just the genius of Dal’s writing.

No, John Travolta wasn’t actually in the commercial. He’s just doing his voice because it would be funny if Travolta were in the commercial. Yeah, so these other voices he’s doing now are supposed to be from a sitcom from the ’70s that I guess was pretty popular, but I can’t find anything about it online.

I think he must be making a funny face or something here, because the audience just laughs for like forty-five seconds.

All right, so for this next two or three minutes, I don’t know how much of AP US history you remember, but it really helps if you’re familiar with Martha Mitchell and her role during Watergate. I don’t think she actually ever said anything about Chumpy Chuckers on the record, but if she did, it definitely would have sounded like this. We’ll have to look up what her voice sounded like later.

That’s his “hippie” voice. He does it in many other bits, too, but I think it works best here because it underlines his biggest theme on the album: “What if the cartoon bear from the Chumpy Chuckers commercial were a hippie?”

I’ll admit that there’s a lot of really good comedy out there today, but I think you’ll have to agree that no one is doing material like this anymore. It really is a shame.

All right, so that’s the first track. Kind of puts you in the mood for some Chumpy Chuckers, right? Ha ha.

Hey, before we listen to the next one, would you do me a favor? Can you tell me how my slide whistle noise sounds?

From Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note, here’s a letter written by E.B. White in 1973 to a man who said he had “lost faith in humanity”. It begins:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

God, I hope he’s right.

Tags: E.B. White · Shaun Usher

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I completely understand the need to obsess over whatever happened in Butler, PA tonight (color me shocked that something terrible would happen in small town western Pennsylvania…..). But all the rampant speculation, and that very much includes from the media, really doesn’t help here. I would recommend what I am doing, which is turning off the TV (well, I never watch cable news anyway under any circumstances and very much including this one), putting on Sugar’s Copper Blue album, and turning up real loud while doing literally anything else. You will be better off, I promise you. When we actually know something about what happened, then we can talk about it. All of liberal/left Twitter is like THE NAZIS ARE COMING, THIS IS THE WORST THING OF ALL TIME, etc. It’s really unhelpful.

…[Rob] Hey all, I probably don’t need to say this, but I would appreciate if y’all could flag anything that looks like “should have been a better shot” or “political assassinations are good, actually” made in a serious way. There is no place for that kind of commentary on this blog. — Management

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