"Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill to fund Ozempic with Medicare at $1,500 a month."

"Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is approved for Medicare, it goes to Medicaid. And there is a push to recommend Ozempic for Americans as young as six over a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: "Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill to fund Ozempic with Medicare at $1,500 a month. Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is… pic.twitter.com/NGaK6pMjbj

— Camus (@newstart_2024) January 29, 2025

What if the best remedy for obesity is...

... stop eating entirely — just fast until you reach your goal weight — even if it takes 382 days?

ADDED: I'm just asking "what if"? Apparently, it's not a good experiment to try on your own.

Don't send 4-year-olds to school. Send them to work.

Says Cornell Anthropologist Meredith F. Small:

Look outside Western culture and watch children, even very small children, as they gather firewood, weed gardens, haul water, tend livestock, care for younger children and run errands. And no one complains because they are mostly outside and usually with other children....

When we were an agriculturally based nation, American children used to work just as hard and contribute in the same way. But now, Western children are trained intellectually, in school, where they are taught to think about things as the entree to adulthood...

Everyone sits quietly at their desks, thinking and thinking, just when they’d rather be out tending cows or weeding the garden.

And then we think and think about why there's so much obesity.

Small talks about how young children, working, contribute economically, and notes that we've lost that economic value to children, because we're not farmers. Ah, but confining very young children to classrooms is an economic concept in America. It's childcare, paid for by taxpayers who wouldn't accept paying for the childcare of parents who want (or need) to go to work. The children, unschooled, would be an economic burden on parents who would either purchase private childcare or forgo income from the second of 2 parents working.

If what's really going on is taxpayer-funded childcare, then not only are taxpayers tricked into accepting paying for something they would reject if they knew what it was, but also children are being run through hours and hours of confinement performing exercises that are not honestly premised on benefiting them.

ADDED: There's also that new study that says sitting is as bad as smoking. Since we wouldn't force kids to smoke, why are we forcing them to sit? We're even giving a lot of the kids drugs to overcome their disinclination to sit. It's like forcing kids to smoke and giving them drugs to help them smoke.

"Oh, jeez, oh, jeez, what a great first call of the day. I'm glad you said it and not me."

Is it okay to say a woman is getting fat if she's made America's fat kids her cause? Maybe not, so better put through the caller who'll say it for you.

And then play that issue with other callers. Stuff like this:

CALLER: Hi, Rush. If I sound shaky, I apologize, I'm nervous. I'm so honored to talk to you.

RUSH: You don't sound shaky and you don't sound nervous at all. You don't sound like you're jiggling in the slightest.

CALLER: Oh, not jiggling like Michelle Obama, but anyway, that's another story.

RUSH: I knew she was going to say that, that's why, see, Pavlov's here, all I had to say was jiggling and I knew that you were gonna mention Michelle Obama. Do you think she's gaining weight, too?

CALLER: Yeah, but I'll tell you exactly where it is, it's right around her rear end and her thighs but, you know, that's exactly where it went, but some women gain weight there. It's okay. It's obvious she has put on a few pounds. The reason I'm calling, though, I'm so excited for November 2nd. I'm so excited, you know, my father-in-law refers to it as flushing out the pipes in a clogged toilet. I think it's great. I'm so excited. But as you've said just a few minutes ago in the blame game and Obama blaming other people and blaming Bush, now the American people, I'm just really afraid that this is going to get him reelected in two years.

Notice how he avoided saying it himself, but he couldn't resist bragging about how he knew he could make the caller say that. 

(Both callers were female, by the way. It helps to get women to go after the women on the sensitive female stuff.)

Asking to be insulted and getting it.

I just ran across this passage written by David Rakoff, in an essay — from this book — about Paris fashion shows:

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, “What can you write that hasn’t been written already?”

He’s absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with at that moment is that Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?

Lose weight...

Drink 2 glasses of water before each meal.

"Michael Bloomberg tells people where to smoke and where to walk in Times Square, how much fat they can have in their food..."

"... how much fat they can have in their food, bullies anybody who gets in his way. Now anybody who disagrees with him on the building of this mosque is against freedom of religion and the First Amendment. Why? Because Bloomberg stamps his foot and says so, that's why."

The human being got smart by eating meat.

A theory:

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers....

Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain — which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle...

Interesting insight into evolution, but it doesn't say anything about what we should eat today. In evolutionary times, gathering plant material and chewing and swallowing enough of it to survive took a lot of energy. Today, we get more than enough. We have "big guts" in a different sense and for a different reason. So burning extra calories digesting low-calorie plants is probably a good idea.

By the way, if the brain uses 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle, why can't we lose weight by thinking hard?

"NHS tells cancer boy, 5, he is 'too fat'... after putting on TWO POUNDS during chemotherapy."

Cancer boy... that's pretty insensitive... But this is really insensitive:

A gruelling course of chemotherapy caused his weight to plummet to just two stone. So when five-year-old cancer patient Lewis Mighty put on a few pounds, his mother was overjoyed. Until, that is, she received a letter from the NHS bluntly telling her that Lewis was overweight.

With astonishing insensitivity, it warned her that he was at risk of cancer - despite being just two pounds over his recommended weight. The letter suggested Lewis should take up swimming, even though an intravenous drip in his chest to deliver life-saving drugs prevents him from being in water.

Pear-shaped women have bad memories.

As you already know, it's bad to be fat. But there's always more news about fat. The way you are fat matters. You've probably already heard that it's bad to be apple-shaped, and maybe you were taking comfort in the fact that you are fat, but pear-shaped. The new news is here to rip that comfort away from you. On the other hand, it will be easier to forget.

Michelle Obama is out of synch with the fatshionistas.

Robin Givhan writes about the body acceptance movement. Most of her essay is about the desire for cutting-edge fashion in plus sizes. (She embarrasses the president of Lane Bryant for saying his customer is mainly concerned with comfort and "might be a year behind" on style.) Tucked away at the end is the part about Michelle Obama. The First Lady has been Givhan's prime subject these days (unfortunately), and it's surprising to find something critical of her in a Givhan column (even if it is given low prominence).  Let me highlight it:

What some currently see as the most distressing assault on their dignity is first lady Michelle Obama with her fight against childhood obesity.

"I'm really appalled at the first lady's campaign. I think it will do more harm than good," says Linda Bacon, author of "Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight." "I applaud her for some of the specific programs, but when it's done in the name of obesity, it's going to backfire on her."

Bacon was one of about a dozen researchers and authors who signed a letter to Obama voicing concern that her emphasis on weight was stigmatizing a population rather than dealing with the broader health issues. "I think it's great for kids to have a better connection to their food," Bacon says. 

Bacon. Great name. No seriously.

A grand and lustrous name. And if you thought a joke was in order, you should be ashamed of yourself... of your mind. Not your body, of course. Love your glorious, ample body.

Back to Linda Bacon:

But by focusing on weight, "you're teaching kids that they did something wrong to get the body they have."

The women do not dismiss decades of scientific research on obesity, but they are distrustful of the conclusions as well as the methodology. They know they exercise; they feel healthy. One young woman shared that she was a vegan and has always been a big girl. Mostly, however, they argue that everyone should eat better and move more -- not just the overweight. So why point a finger at fat people?

Givhan has the access to extract a response from Michelle Obama. The questions I'd ask: How can you talk about taking personal responsibility when what people hear is blame? If people are saying they feel good about themselves, do you really want to make them feel bad? Even those of us who don't favor inspiring self-esteem all the time want to know why you want to tear people down in the effort to get them to do something they'll probably never be able to do very well? But Michelle Obama is someone who's big on promoting self-esteem, so she's got a particularly difficult problem achieving coherence. You can't just be for everything that's good. Everyone must feel good and be virtuous. How does that work?

I assume Givhan will get back to us with the First Lady's response. Until then, let's speculate. I predict she'll go on about her garden and how delicious vegetables can be: If only these women would taste vegetables — really taste her most excellent vegetables — then they will love eating right and all the incoherence will melt away. You can love yourself, love your body, love all your food and eat right and be healthy — feel healthy and be healthy. Of course, that's emphatically not true, but one feels so pretty saying it. And that is what we want — to feel pretty.

ADDED:

"Gainer blogs are an offshoot of a fat-pride movement..."

"... that has bubbled up in response to what its proponents consider to be a pointless and hysterical national fuss over obesity. In this view fat is a form of social protest, an outcry against the manipulations of a diet-industrial complex."

"It gave me pecs, gave me definition, it gave me confidence."

Spanx for men.

Fabulous, for the unnaked man.

Iggy Pop says law is for "for hideous bald fat dead people. The living dead."

"In America, in school... I learnt creative writing, I learnt advanced algebra and geometry, but I didn’t learn there was such a thing as intellectual property. I didn’t learn how to read a contract. And I didn’t care about those things. Those things were for hideous bald fat dead people. The living dead. They still are, but now I do my living-dead s***work every day. And I can feel the hair follicles reacting.”

Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey — "We always seem to get rid of the good dames."

"[Courtney] Love is keen to align herself to these historical figures [who appear on the cover of her new album]. Strong, misunderstood women, all of whom met a grisly end."

Also pictured on the album cover, Courtney herself: "This picture is when I was very skinny - I'm almost six feet tall and at this point I'm about 101 lbs. No drugs, just total neuroses making this record."

6 feet tall and 101 pounds? If you say that's strong, then you will be misunderstood.

These super-skinny people who claim it just happened when they so focused on work. Such dedication to art that they forgot to eat. I've got to suspect they are lying, but if they are not... try writing the diet book about that weight-loss method.

If your suspicion is that Courtney is using drugs, this is a funny sentence: "The 45-year-old says she has been sober for 'seven years' and currently only takes prescription medications." Oh? Prescription medications? Okay? Or... grisly.

(Or, at least, gristly.)

"I don’t want to be thinking... about how many calories are in this slice of (delicious!) olive bread..."

"...or in that crème brulee or pile of pea shoots sauteed in sesame oil with garlic. And I certainly don’t want to see that information on a menu. Two words that have no place on a good restaurant’s menu: 'Nutrition information.'"

ADDED: I note the phrase "a good restaurant." So is it fine as far as Sifton is concerned to require fast food joints to display the calorie counts? Exactly why?

Questions that brought 1 visitor to my blog today.

From SiteMeter.

why do men like collarbones?
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IN THE COMMENTS: Original George said...

Love, peace, and compassion were surrounding me. They were almost palpable. It was incredible. I was in total bliss. Even the foosball players hesitated long enough to appreciate the elongated notes as he suspended them in midair until they were almost palpable. They were almost palpable. For three weeks we had felt it, touched it almost; it engulfed us; it was warm. We were completely infatuated. Brass and woodwind players were on stage, and in the balcony, swinging their instruments and playing chords so dense they were almost palpable. They were almost palpable, and it was very easy to feel sorry for her character because of the injustices she suffered from her husband. With the international community frowning heavily upon him and local expectations becoming so strong, they were almost palpable. I felt that the passion, ambition, revenge, tension, etc. were so descriptive that they were almost palpable. The narrator also did a stunning job of bringing memories materialized from the walls, so strong they were almost palpable. Grandpop bursting through the front door, the decibel level skyrocketing off the cries of outrage were so intense, they were almost palpable. How could the writers do this to us? Did they not know that Jane would never try out? For upon the eyeballs, affecting the sight as though they were almost palpable to the touch, the dews had not descended, but the leaves were still wet.

What happens when you Google the phrase "they were almost palpable."

He's right! And here I was reading that and trying to understand where the mind of OrigGeo was going with that story.

Meanwhile, Jennifer says...

Oh, I thought we were speaking of one curious surfer who kept ending up at Althouse no matter what new question they came up [with]. That was a funnier mental image.

... and I laugh out loud.

What year was it?

My history blogging continues. Before clicking, see if you know the year.

"Boston Corset Maker Says Women Have Grown Stouter" — and the the 21-inch waist is a thing of the past.

The Chief Justice spoke of Lincoln's "Christ-like character," but the President said Lincoln was a "natural human being with the frailties mixed with the virtues of humanity" — as the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated today.

Mrs. A.N. George of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage is offended by the reference to "the tactics of the pole-cat when badly frightened" that appeared in a resolution by the New England Woman Suffrage Association.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyles visits New York and opines on Coney Island, suffragists, plumage laws, and skyscrapers.

Why hasn't the Women's Party put up a female candidate for President?

"Every man turned into a devil. We ran fighting and clawing and scratching and swearing for the ladder leading up to the deck. We found the hatches battened down. Great God, how the men did curse!" A terrible ship fire.

The NYT tries to explain the physics of "Young Professor Heisenberg," and Lady Grace Drummond-Hay talks to General Hermann Wilhelm Goering.

Tom Wolfe "suggested that intellectuals are attracted to socialism because it seems in 'good taste"" and it has the '''secret promise' ... that intellectuals will wind up with power."

The NYT wonders why it is that the 12 greatest women alive in the United States today are all childless.

The absolutely insane talk of Obama promising Hillary Clinton the next seat on the Supreme Court.

I have avoided talking about this but now there's a WaPo column on the subject and I can't stand it anymore. James Andrew Miller writes:

It's likely that the next president will face at least one Supreme Court vacancy. Obama should promise Hillary Clinton, now, that if he wins in November, the vacancy will be hers, making her first on a list of one.

How could Hillary Clinton possibly be considered an appropriate Supreme Court nominee?

Obama could ... appreciate Clinton's undeniably keen mind. Even Clinton detractors have noted her remarkable mental skills; she would be equal to any legal or intellectual challenge she would face as a justice. The fact that she hasn't served on a bench before would be inconsequential, considering her experience in law and in government.

Now, why did WaPo publish this? Miller was a special assistant to Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. and he has a book about the Senate, but he sounds like a complete fool here. His notion that Hillary Clinton belongs on the Supreme Court is just: Everybody seems to think she's pretty smart. And it doesn't even matter that she has no judicial experience and has never done anything to indicate that she is any sort of a legal scholar or has anything like a judicial temperament.

If Obama were to promise Clinton the first court vacancy, her supporters would actually have a stronger incentive to support him for president than they would if she were going to be vice president.

No, they wouldn't! They'd think that Obama shouldn't be trusted with the responsibility of appointing federal judges.

Instead of subjecting herself to a long wait and another possible defeat, [Hillary] could don one of those roomy black robes, make a potentially ineradicable impact on the course of the republic -- and never again have to worry about being liked.

"Roomy black robes" — is he calling her fat?

Senate confirmation would be all but certain, even putting aside the gains that Democrats are likely to make in November.

Why not just beg people to vote for McCain? The Senate is going to rubber-stamp whatever unqualified, politicized judicial nominations a President Obama would send its way? Well, then, we must have the opposite party in the White House!

President Obama would engender praise (at least from Democrats) at the prospect of Hillary going toe to toe with Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito. Clinton's gumption and determination might make her one of the most powerful forces ever on the court, particularly when it comes to swaying other justices when the court is closely divided.

Miller thrills at the prospect of law as a raw political battle. Democrats who respect the rule of law and want rights to be taken seriously should not cheer at that spectacle. And conservatives will once again get strong traction arguing — as McCain did the other day — that their judges are the ones who are faithfully subservient to the law. I know liberals don't believe that, but they must present themselves as wanting judges who bring legitimate interpretative skill and diligence to their task and operate independently from politics. Or all is lost.