Former President Donald Trump has narrowed down his vice presidential short list to seven candidates, or so it seems based on who reportedly received vetting materials from the campaign. Trump is unpredictable and his pick of former Vice President Mike Pence was largely kept under wraps before the announcement. But there are some useful insights to be gleaned from the reported veepstakes semifinalists.

Donald Trump's running mate for the presidential election will likely be male, according to booking odds, which may come as a surprise following predictions that he will choose a woman. The former president and GOP 2024 presumptive nominee is yet to publicly announce who he will choose as his running mate in the presidential election but speculation has increased over the last few weeks and months about who it could be. According to the website oddschecker, the five most...

"Those songs and the performance are clearly extraordinary”. The post “Stands the test of time”: Gene Simmons’ favourite album by The Who first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

On June 6, 1944 — 80 years ago, to the date — some 73,000 American soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy, stormed into the Nazi machine gun fire, scaled the cliffs beyond the sand, and began the long, grueling task of taking back a continent. 2,501 of them — many teenagers, some in their early 20s — would never see the other side. “We were all kids between the ages of 17 and 24,” recalled one American veteran. When their boat touched the beach, “it was like a movie…the horizon just erupted.” “I didn’t know what was happening,” said another. “I only knew I had to do what I had to do.” These were the men — boys, really — who we asked to kill for us. We asked them to run towards the gunfire, watch their friends die beside them, and be prepared to die themselves, if necessary. And they did so, without question. They were proud to do it. Thousands of underage American boys lied about their age, concocted stories about their birth dates, and forged their parents’ signatures to enlist. One D-Day veteran, Joseph Argenzio, was just 16 when he landed on the beaches of Normandy: “Argenzio wanted nothing more than to serve his country as his father had, with distinction and valor,” one account noted. (He didn’t tell his parents he had enlisted until after the fact). By the time he made it to France, he was “serving as part of the same division his father had in the last war.” Why was he so eager to join? Simple, he later said: “God and country.” But what has become of the country these men fought for? Of the dwindling number of surviving veterans, some are no longer sure. At an event in Normandy yesterday commemorating the anniversary of D-Day, one World War II hero was asked what he thought of America today. “The real truth?” he grimaced. “I feel like a foreigner in my own country lots of times. And I don’t like it. It makes my heart real heavy.” He wasn’t the first World War II veteran to notice as much. In 2022, Carl Dekle — a decorated veteran who joined the Marines in 1940, and won a Silver Star for his bravery in action against the Japanese — broke down into uncontrollable tears when asked the same question. Dekle, then celebrating his 100th birthday, told the interviewer: The things we did, and the things we fought for, and the boys that died for it — it’s all gone down the drain. Our country’s going to hell in a hand basket. We haven’t got the country we had when I was raised. Not at all. Nobody will have the fun I had. Nobody will have the opportunity I had. It’s just not the same. That’s not what our boys — that’s not what they died for. This sense — that something has gone terribly wrong in America; that our country is suddenly no longer our own — is not confined to the veterans of our wars, although it is perhaps most painful for them, as they gave the most to defend the thing we have lost. In surveys of white working-class voters performed in the run-up to the 2016 election, pollsters found that one of the strongest predictors of support for Trump was agreement with the statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” The sentiment isn’t solely the purview of the white working-class, nor even Trump supporters writ large: A 2019 Axios poll found that a full 60 percent of Americans felt the same, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and those not affiliated with either major party. While other polls have found that the national share of Americans who feel this way is closer to the mid-40s, majorities of Republicans consistently express agreement: 56 percent of Republicans in 2021 (PRRI), and 69 percent of “strong Republicans” in 2022 (University of Chicago). Perhaps they’re right. Many Americans — particularly white, rural and exurban, Christian, conservative Americans, whose identity and way of life sit far outside of the centers of power in modern America — are rapidly learning that there is no place for them in the New America that their elites have devoted the past few decades to building. Those who still cling to the Old America — particularly those who fought for it in combat — are stuck with unanswerable questions, frozen on the tips of their tongues. It is a bewildering, disconcerting sensation to lose one’s country. When, how, and why the America that the boys of Normandy fought for disappeared are questions that we are only now learning how to ask. But they are questions we must ask, in earnest, lest we become a nation of amnesiacs and forget where we come from for good. READ MORE: Reckoning of a Race Hustler The Purpose of Pride Month The post Strangers in Their Own Country appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Identity Cult By Mary Margaret Olohan (Regnery, 288 pages, $33) The transgender movement is, at its core, a quest for happiness. Daily Signal senior reporter Mary Margaret Olohan begins her new book, Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Identity Cult, by observing that every trans-identifying individual felt the “same driving force: the desperate desire to know who you are and to be happy.”  Throughout Detrans, Olohan weaves together the stories of five detransitioners — individuals who once identified as transgender, underwent social and/or medical transitions to resemble the opposite sex, came to regret the decisions, and reverted to presenting in accord with their biological sex. Following their detransitions, these individuals, four of whom are women, have started to speak out against the abuse they endured at the hands of doctors, therapists, and school employees. Their psychologists and doctors spoke about a “gender journey” and rapidly eliminated all safeguards that stood as barriers on the path to self-discovery. School therapists hid one girl’s transition from her parents, who were initially skeptical of their daughter’s claim that she was a boy. Planned Parenthood employees prescribed a three-month supply of testosterone to another girl after a 20-minute consultation. Doctors approved cosmetic surgeries — double mastectomies — for teenage girls in the middle of puberty. (READ MORE: England Bans Puberty Blockers, American Activists Double Down) The women in Detrans all began to question their identities because being feminine seemed uncomfortable, unattainable, or downright terrifying. Battling intense gender dysphoria in conjunction with — and, perhaps, in response to — various mental illnesses and sexual traumas, all four individuals identified what seemed to be a solution: stop being a girl. Wracked with dysphoria, the girls searched for the elusive “gender euphoria” heralded by transgender activists. If their bodies finally aligned with their perceived gender identities, they would be free. For these teenagers, it started with changing their pronouns and names. Shortly after, doctors, therapists, and activists — though the line that separates them is increasingly blurred — foisted testosterone prescriptions upon them. In the blink of an eye, these teenage girls had scars in place of breasts. Their metamorphosis was supposedly complete, but gender euphoria — the “joy caused when one’s gendered experience aligns with their gender identity, rather than with the gender they were assigned at birth” — remained elusive.  “As she moved forward with her transition and continued taking testosterone, Prisha noticed that she was still suicidal and struggling with her mental health,” Olohan writes. “But she attributed that to the fact that she hadn’t had top surgery yet, or that she hadn’t been on hormones long enough, or that she hadn’t had a hysterectomy yet. ‘I was like, I have to keep chasing, and chasing, and chasing, and then I’ll be happy and then I’ll be aligned, and then I’ll be in the right body,’ she said.”  Prisha underwent a double mastectomy, referred to as “top surgery” by the trans community, and immediately experienced what she called “surgery euphoria.” Severely anorexic throughout her medical transition, Prisha was thrilled that the procedure had lowered her weight by eight pounds. Olohan notes: Prisha had also tried to convince her team to let her get a liposuction. But they had refused, Prisha told me, claiming that Prisha wasn’t able to consent to this type of surgery because of her anorexia. Her desire for liposuction was attached to her body dysmorphia and eating disorder. No such caution was exercised with her gender dysmorphia–generated desire to remove her breasts.  Nevertheless, Prisha was happy with the operation’s results — for a while, at least. Soon, she found herself in familiar territory. The next step of transitioning always beckoned, promising the euphoria that always seemed just out of reach. (RELATED: The Trans Reckoning Is Not Yet Here — But It’s Coming Soon) Prisha was far from alone. Every person Olohan interviewed expressed a similar unfulfilled hope that the next step could deliver the desired relief. The beginnings of the transition had been rocky, though reversible. But asking parents and peers to use different pronouns or a new nickname soon spiraled into puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones, then irreversible surgeries. Giving up on the pursuit of gender euphoria and becoming “detrans” meant admitting to an error, facing the scrutiny of family and friends, and bearing the scars of medical transition throughout the rest of life. Over time, Prisha, Chloe, Luka, and Helena realized that their social and medical transitions had not alleviated their persistent unhappiness. And though a coterie of concerned professionals had coaxed them along the path to transition, no one was willing to help them reverse course.  The unhealed wounds from her mastectomy gave Chloe pause, and she realized at the age of 15 that she wanted to be a mother. Dealing with painful complications from testosterone injections, Luka weaned herself off of the hormone. Helena’s girlfriend created a timeline of their photos together throughout the years. Seeing her face and body change — “‘from so young, hopeful, and most of all, recognizable, to weary, deadpan, and foreign,’” she told Olohan — filled Helena with regret.  Prisha’s first revelation came through therapy. As she began resolving trauma, Olohan writes, “She found the ‘healing’ that she had so desperately sought through transition.” If transitioning was hard, detransitioning proved even harder. Olohan explains:  Though [Prisha] initially ‘medically detransitioned’ by stopping her testosterone injections … she continued to live, act, and dress like a man for a while. She also had a bit of a beard at this point, and she wasn’t shaving. ‘I was too deep in the shame and the lie,’ she said. ‘I was like, well, I’ve uprooted my entire life and everybody else’s for this. I have to live with it.  Prisha began dating a man who had a three-year-old daughter. She attributes her social detransition to the girl. “Despite all that stuff I said about living as a man and literally having a beard, she started to call me ‘Mommy,’” Prisha told Olohan. “She looked at me and she said it with her arms extended towards me … And then I was like, ‘That’s it. I know exactly what I want. Anything is worth getting that which I have just had a taste of.” Prisha fully detransitioned. Earlier this week, she gave birth to a child of her own. Detrans offers a powerful, step-by-step account of what transgender liberation theory actually looks like in practice. It’s a hard and haunting — but necessary — book to read. Olohan’s compassionate approach gives a voice to those who the LGBTQ community would rather ignore: the individuals who questioned the movement’s veracity as their lives fell apart under its influence.  Mary Frances Myler is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.  READ MORE by Mary Frances Myler:  Bishops Sue Biden’s EEOC for Mandating Employers ‘Accommodate Employee Abortions’ Even Portland Is Fed Up with Progressive Policies  The Longhouse Comes for ‘Lomez’ The post Chasing Gender Euphoria appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It’s not enough anymore that everything stinks in Joe Biden’s America. No, Biden is now making sure the entire world knows what a shitty president he is. Literally. You’ve surely seen this… Awkward pic.twitter.com/3KNLco85hj — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 6, 2024 …and you’ve surely noted the stock explanation, which is that Bidem awkwardly attempted to sit down while Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was introduced at that D-Day commemoration in Normandy on Thursday. Biden was not attempting to sit down. Everybody knows it. Out of a sense of partisanship or perhaps even leftover politics-stops-at-the-water’s-edge patriotism, nobody among our ruling-class talking heads wants to break the pantomime. 1. Lies Stink, and So Do Biden’s Trousers We’ll just dispense with the obvious. Biden had an “accident.” If that isn’t what happened, then feel free to explain why he and DOCTOR Jill, the latter-day Lady MacBeth AWFL who is most responsible for putting the nation through this pitiable exercise in elder abuse (it would make Biden a sympathetic figure but for the atrocious life of sexual misbehavior, treason, malign dishonesty, and corruption he’s led at public expense), picked up and left in the middle of the ceremony. His advance team was not in his colon… My heart goes to French President Macron – for covering Joe by greeting and hugging D-Day vets. pic.twitter.com/bkZ9T0Ec69 — Charles R. Smith (@softwarnet) June 6, 2024 Biden had been caught on a mic as he walked into the ceremony telling French premier Emmanuel Macron that his “advance team” told him he would need to leave early. Probably not that early. And Macron was left to gladhand with American D-Day veterans who didn’t look overly excited that their own president staged what looked like his second evacuation in five minutes. Go ahead and try to make me believe that was all part of the plan. We know it wouldn’t be the first time Biden has dumped his pants in public. This was just a couple of weeks ago. My president, stays in court, because those pricks are trying to screw him over. But this holiday weekend Trump is on the road, campaigning . Where is poopy pants Joe? Biden shits his pants! Vote Trump pic.twitter.com/9FrdH52qyv — Duwright (@wrighthouse1582) May 26, 2024 It also ties into the other thing everybody knows about Biden but the praetorian-guard press corps supposedly reporting on the White House won’t discuss, which is that to get Biden’s cognitive engines spun up enough to speak and function in a manner resembling normal mental acuity, they have to dose him with stimulants at levels beyond just a little pick-me-up. Pump enough uppers into an octogenarian like Biden, and what you get is — we hope, for the sake of the people who have to be around him — a full diaper. We hope he’s got Depends on. If not, well, then Biden’s immediate surroundings are probably about as pleasant as the effects of his border policies or Bidenomics. Let’s not waste our time with lies. This presidency has officially gone to shit. It’s always been bad. But now we’ve reached a level of incontinence which is literal, not just figurative. I’m sure we’re going to get denials. Maybe we’ll get them from the dingleberries at the Atlantic, who gleefully spread anonymously sourced lies about Donald Trump calling D-Day veterans “suckers” and “losers” during a previous trip to Normandy — despite multiple close Trump officials who went on the record forcefully asserting that story was not true. Go ahead, fellas. Tell me I’m lying about Biden soiling himself in front of the whole planet. Then we can discuss your own record of veracity, and whether you have even so much as a splinter of credibility left as you shill for this hideously unfit, mostly dead, feculent cretin in the White House. 2. Yes, But Is This the Last Straw? After Biden’s own personal Dunkirk — or Dumpkirk, perhaps? — on Thursday, there was a bit of chatter that this was going to finally force the Democrats to make a change. Of course Joe Biden will be replaced The question now is How racist will it be to sideline Kamala Harris too? pic.twitter.com/Eg4zH9l88o — Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) June 6, 2024 That’s hardly an outlandish view, of course. There was Biden’s utterly disastrous Time interview, then the Wall Street Journal story about his dementia, his announcement of an executive order on border policy that invalidated most of what he’s been saying on the subject, and now this. At some point, and in a sane country we would have passed that point quite some time ago, this becomes utterly unsustainable. But there’s a problem: how do you change Biden out without making such a terrible mess that it’s impossible to clean things up in time for the election? Let’s remember that it’s June. Let’s also remember that to change Biden out like a dirty diaper is very, very difficult if he won’t go along. The only real way you could do that, given that Biden was the only candidate in the primaries and he’s holding pretty much all of the delegates at the convention, is to change him out at the convention. But now you can’t even do that, because the Democrats have now said that, to comply with the Ohio ballot deadline they stupidly scheduled their convention after, they’re going to do a virtual roll-call vote. So what’s the mechanism for getting Biden out unless Biden agrees not to run? And what’s more, how are you going to arrive at a candidate if you aren’t going to do it at an open convention? And how do you manage that without it becoming, to adhere to this column’s theme, a colossal shitshow? I’ve entertained the thought for a long time that ultimately they’d find a way to get rid of Biden and parachute somebody else in. The Ohio mess tells me they can’t. And let’s not forget the abject dolts at National Review screamed at Ohio’s Republican legislative majority that they needed to change state law to accommodate Team Biden’s botching of the convention schedule. One wonders what else National Review is willing to do for Team Biden. 3. Wray Tells Kennedy “No One Is Above The Law” Yeah, right. The subject matter of this was a back-and-forth Sen. John Kennedy initiated in a Senate appropriations hearing by asking FBI director Christopher Wray if the agency was finished investigating the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Which, it strongly appears, is the case. Wray told Kennedy that “no one is above the law,” which is a lie Joe Biden keeps telling to defend his camp’s lawfare campaign against Donald Trump. But while Trump certainly isn’t above the law as administered by Biden, Chris Wray, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Fat Alvin Bragg, and others, it sure does seem like Biden is above the law. As is Nancy Pelosi. And Bill and Hillary Clinton. And Al Sharpton. And Marc Elias. John Brennan. James Clapper. Peter Strzok. Andrew McCabe. And lots and lots of others who never seem to face much in the way of legal consequences for wildly illegal behavior. Meanwhile none of these guys can articulate an underlying crime Trump supposedly committed that would make this woolly falsifying-records beef against him a felony. And none of them seem to care; they just want to pontificate about how “no one is above the law” and that it’s “dangerous” not to respect their kangaroo-court verdicts. Meanwhile, and Kennedy brings this up in his colloquy with Wray, a billionaire New York investor named Henry Jarecki, a dirty old man who was pals with Epstein, has recently been sued by one of the then-underage girls Epstein was tricking out to his pervert pals. Kennedy asked, without using Jarecki’s name, if the 91-year-old was under the FBI’s microscope and the latter demurred as to an answer. One imagines he had to. Henry Jarecki might have to lay out a generous financial settlement to that girl to make the civil case go away, but he isn’t going to face any criminal liability. Why? Because he’s one of the Democrats’ most lavish campaign donors, and that puts him well above the law as long as the Democrats control the Justice Department. Everybody knows it. Wray’s pitiful denials more or less concede the point. Here’s the video: 4. The Fat Pretzel Airplane Dude Video This has gone very viral this week. It isn’t a real thing; it’s a clip from a show called Queenpins. But it’s viral because people can relate to it from countless personal experiences. You’re all likely to have your own takes on this. I’m pretty sure the direction the majority will go in. Here’s mine. It’s a show, so obviously there’s a bit of a dramatic flair here. Fat Pretzel Window-Seat Dude is more obnoxious than most people would be. And yes, he comes off as a jerk. However, he is not wrong. We see this stuff all the time, and the single mom with the little kid is the most common class of offender. Two things about her make her far more obnoxious than Fat Pretzel Window-Seat Dude. First, if she knows that her kid likes looking out of the window, then book a window seat and put your kid in it. Then you don’t have to demand favors from strangers. Second, if you do find yourself demanding favors from strangers, the civil thing to do is offer something in exchange. Maybe it’s money, maybe it’s a share of an Uber ride when the plane lands, maybe it’s an extra ration or two of those delicious Biscoff cookies they hand out on the flight. But you’d get a whole lot farther if your opener is “Hey, my kid is a big fan of watching the plane land. What can I trade you to flip seats with us?” as opposed to attempting emotional blackmail. The offer establishes you as somebody who (1) has something to offer, (2) respects the value of what you’re asking from the other person, and (3) is a person of good faith who isn’t running around the country demanding free things. In other words, that you’re not a Democrat. Who wants to be one of those? 5. Angel Studios Has a New Film Out I thought about using this last segment to get into the hilarious debate currently raging about Hollywood’s new messaging tactic to support its unmarketable IP — the box-office bomb Furiosa for one, and the ridiculously awful new Star Wars spinoff The Acolyte, for another — namely, to attack the male audiences who won’t watch. Instead of that, let’s talk about something less negative. Let’s talk about a movie studio that is actually capable of making profitable films. Angel Studios fits that bill. They’re the folks who put together The Chosen, which is a phenomenally successful depiction of the Gospel, and more recently Angel released The Sound of Freedom last year. Now they’ve got a new property that is available via their own streaming platform. It’s a documentary called After Death, and it covers a fascinating topic: what people who’ve had near-death experiences or have actually died and come back have to say. The trailer… It’s heavy stuff, and for certain those same critics who’ve been screaming at the Normals who refuse to plunk down to watch girlboss action movies or cinema-of-the-queer will trash it if they even bother to pay attention. But it’s a good bet this will be successful, because we can expect a couple of things. First, that a fascinating subject matter will be treated respectfully, and second, that it won’t attack the values of its audience. You’d think those are fairly easy standards for a filmmaker to meet. Hollywood refuses to meet them. That’s one reason Angel Studios and others like them are the future, and the present incumbents in the industry are most certainly not. READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 116: Who’s Attacking the American Justice System? It’s Not Trump. We’ve Always Had To Contend With These People The post Five Quick Things: Joe Biden’s Explosive D-Day Evacuation appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The GLP-1 agonist drugs you have almost certainly heard about, with such names as Wegovy and Ozempic, are the biggest wonder drugs since antibiotics. I know because I asked a couple of AI chatbots if it were true and they agreed. But, I also know the field. The time when infectious disease plagued the West has passed (COVID hysteria aside). Now it’s lifestyle diseases, which tremendously increase the chance of getting infectious diseases that will harm you or carry you off. “Epidemic” has become almost trite, but it certainly applies to fatness in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. For decades now, the percentage of Americans who are overweight has grown. Like a pig in a python or an aardvark in an anaconda, those who are overweight have been moving from being simply overweight to obesity to higher levels of obesity. About three-fourths of the U.S. population was overweight or obese the last time surveys were conducted. It must be worse now. During the same period, the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7 percent to 9.2 percent. (READ MORE: Anthony Fauci Tells Columbia Medical Students to Lie Just Like Him) Internationally? Believe it or not, per capita, there are countries fatter than ours; the U.S. territory of American Samoa is more than 80 percent obese. If the islands sink, don’t blame rising sea levels. It’s projected that by 2035 more than half of the world’s population will be overweight or obese. In the Philippines, where I lived for five years, I watched female obesity go from almost zero to watching rotund girls lumber by, one after another, to enter their favorite feeding ground, the 7/11. Gym memberships, the latest diet crazes, and low-calorie drinks may have helped on an individual basis but they clearly aren’t working overall. You can’t directly blame the food and beverage industries. Force feeding would be perceived as assault and battery in all states and territories. But yeah, they’ve figured out what we like to shove down our gullets. And it’s clobbering us. Obesity Is Costing Us “It has been widely established that elevated BMI is a serious risk factor for a number of chronic diseases, including diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and musculoskeletal disorders,” noted a 2022 study. The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the U.S. last year was over half a trillion, according to a joint Congressional report. Other costs are incalculable, and often subsidized. Theater and stadium seats are being built wider, which means fewer individuals can fit in the same area and thus higher ticket costs. (Airline seats, on the other hand, have actually been made narrower — don’t even get me started on the airlines.) “Social media influencers” and other fat activists who call those who point out these facts “phobic fat-shamers” and insist it’s possible to be “fat but fit,” seem to have a nasty habit of dying young. Having penned a whole book on the obesity epidemic 27 years ago (yes, we used pens back then) I’ve given up hope that anything short of pharmaceutical treatment can reverse this awful trend. Can people keep their weight under control without medication? Yes. Will they? Despite some bizarre fat activists claiming that they somehow enjoy their conditions, nobody wants to be fat and yet they are. (READ MORE: Government Health Coverage for Illegals is a Bad Idea) I first wrote about GLP-1 agonists for The American Spectator in July last year. I noted that initially when the FDA approved them in 2005 for diabetes, researchers noted they were causing weight loss in addition to monitoring blood glucose levels. The drugs are usually self-injected weekly into the stomach (or other body parts with fatty tissue), although there are dosing variations and some come in pill form. They are not just marginally effective. They seem to prompt a 15 percent weight loss, although clinical trials usually end after a year so we don’t know if that’s the limit. Some of the newer configurations have caused weight loss beyond that. Last June, a study using Eli Lilly’s retatrutide reported weight declines never before seen with a single drug, with patients averaging a 24 percent body weight loss in just 11 months and many in the group on the highest dose dropping more than 30 percent. That’s the same ballpark as drastic bariatric surgery, and all groups were still losing weight when the trial ended! They have proved massive money makers for pharmaceutical companies, first for diabetes and now for fat reduction. Currently, eight different formulations are in, or have graduated, the third and usually last phase of clinical trials, with seven more for phase II, and six for phase I. All may prove safe and effective. We’ve never seen anything like this. (Meanwhile, the last full-spectrum antibiotic, ciprofloxacin (Cipro) was approved way back in 1987, and last year the FDA withdrew the label for the lowest dose 100 mg tablets because the drug is losing potency against bacteria; but that’s a different issue. A very alarming one.) In that previous TAS article, I defended GLP drugs against allegations that they might cause thyroid cancer (the FDA has required a warning label) and pancreatic cancer. I noted that, with a cure rate of nearly 100 percent, thyroid malignancies barely qualify as cancer. This year a British Medical Journal study comprising GLP users in three Scandinavian countries has found no relationship to thyroid carcinomas. The FDA warning needs to disappear. As to pancreatic cancer, that was always a tenuous link, and a study released in January that followed half a million GLP users over seven years found no increased pancreatic cancer risk. Mind, many adult cancers can take years to manifest but that falls along a bell curve with some developing relatively quickly. In a cohort that large, you’d find them. They didn’t. As more and more people use the drugs, we can expect to find more people with unwanted side effects like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and constipation. Worst case scenario: Stop, reduce dosage, or switch to another formulation. Meanwhile, a risk-risk analysis would note that, since obesity has been linked to almost countless cancers, even if it did increase the risk of any single one, that would be irrelevant. As it happens, the GLP leader, Danish Novo Nordisk, has just released the results from a four-year study; the results are pretty spectacular. It comprised more than 17,000 non-diabetic patients from over 40 countries and found Wegovy indefinitely reduced weight for the full period, as well as reducing deaths and illness from heart disease. Don’t like needles? Novo, along with Lilly, is in late-stage testing of pills that have caused 15 percent weight reductions in less than a year. Other research is focused on stretching out time between dosing. GLP-1s Will Be in Short Supply for a While Before you rush off to your physician, there are a few things you should know. One is that the drugs are in short supply and will remain so until at least next year. As soon as they roll off the production line, they’re scarfed up as quickly as the protagonist in the nauseating (in more ways than one) movie The Whale scarfed down those pizzas. There have been almost desperate campaigns to get doctors to reserve the diabetic-level drugs for diabetics. However, non-obese people will seek out the drugs for some good reasons. One is the harmful effects of too much fat don’t begin at what we call obesity. That’s essentially an arbitrary line. It’s why articles on fat-related health problems usually lump them together. Anything linked to obesity is still bad at what we call overweight, which helps explain the “over,” and is worse at what we call extreme obesity. Yes, carrying the weight near the abdominal region is worst but unfortunately, we can’t pick and choose. At my most overweight I’ve had a big belly but absolutely nothing goes to my appendages. Boo-hoo for me. Plus, yeah, it’s nifty to fit into the same jeans at 60 that you did at 20. Apparently, a lot of women do like “dad bods,” but men almost always prefer lean at any age. So it could be a long time before there’s enough medicine to match demand. Another problem with getting the meds is that given all the health benefits of the GLP1s you might think that your private health insurance plan plus Medicaid and Medicare would cover them. You would probably be wrong. For diabetes, yes. But Medicare has traditionally not covered weight-loss drugs because, in the past, they didn’t work. Now suddenly they do we have been caught off-guard. About a quarter of U.S. corporate insurers cover GLPs for obesity, but if you don’t get insurance through your employer forget it. State Medicaid plans make their own rules regarding everything, with many plans refusing to cover vision and dental —  something nobody claims is unnecessary or the realm of scammers. A 2023 survey found that 16 states’ Medicaid systems provided some sort of coverage, but generally with tight rules. North Carolina did cover them, but as of April 1, it no longer does, explaining “The cost of these medications was projected to exceed $170 million in 2024, jumping to more than $1 billion over the next six years. This exceeds the amount the State Health Plan spends on cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and chemotherapy medications.” As for Medicare, the importance of establishing that the drugs have health benefits beyond those attributable to weight loss allows an end run around the rule. Indeed, Medicare does now cover some of the drugs for which it’s found sound evidence that they reduce heart disease and stroke, again independently of the impact of lowering fat levels. But it’s threatening to break the bank. In 2022, Medicare Part D spending on GLPs reached $5.7 billion, up from just $57 million in 2018. Ozempic alone came in at 6th place among top-selling Part D drugs in 2022. Which connects us to our next problem. If you’re thinking of paying out of pocket, you’ll run into why Medicaid is balking. Price gouging. But only for Americans. Yes, wave that big green foam “We’re Number One!” A recent survey found Ozempic (injectable), Rybelsus (pill form), and Wegovy, all from Novo, cost between $936 and $1,349 for a month’s supply. A bar graph shows for Ozempic shows a one-month U.S. supply at $936 is over five times higher than the cost in Japan ($169), the second-highest price point for the drug. The lowest price point for Ozempic is $83 in France. Right. It’s over 10 times the price in the States. They weren’t cherry-picking; I randomly chose Spain and it was on the high side for Europe but still only $141. Personally, I could afford these drugs almost anywhere but in the U.S., especially given understandable evidence that GLP users are lowering their grocery bills. An analysis found a 6 to 9 percent decrease in grocery spending, particularly among snacks, pastries, and ice cream, while sales of vegetable snacks, fish, and yogurt increased. Sacre bleu! In France, the drugs could more than pay for themselves. (We writers prefer “sacre bleu” over the more common “Mon Dieu” because “My God!” is universal though still literally taking the Lord’s name in vain, while who the heck singles out a color?) Other financial side benefits to users would be decreased use of medicines and delaying, perhaps forever, joint surgery. But upfront costs indicate no medication, for me and most Americans. And sorry to say that writing a book on overweight and obesity, as I have, is not talismanic. Granted, I’m getting on in years, still suffering a leg problem that inhibits exercise, and my Sunday 5-hour bike rides have been replaced by nothing. Pharmaceutical Companies Are Making Plenty On GLP-1s Naturally, though, these drugs are very expensive to make! Wrong! Er, mistaken, gentle reader. While GLPs are not complex biologics that could be produced and sold at a profit for as little as 89 cents a month, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, the retail prices can be almost 400 times higher than the estimated cost of production. The drug companies always claim production costs are of little relevance, that what counts is cost savings from problems averted. Plus they have to recoup their losses on all the drugs that fail, which is the great majority. Both are valid points. But even that low French price ensures a substantial profit and the real question, with pharmaceuticals generally, is why are Americans always footing the darned bill? The answer is that they have a literal (not figurative) conspiracy between the AMA, Big Pharma, and insurance companies that manifests itself in all areas of health care, and because the U.S. government subsidizes health insurance paid by employers, which is fine if you qualify but otherwise it sucks. Mind, Medicare negotiates with pharmaceutical companies. At this point, I have no answer as to why it allows itself to be gouged. On our behalf, of course. Finally, there is a cap on GLP usage by some of those who need it most. Psychological. Overeating is often, perhaps usually, self-medication. Many of us will gladly forgo it for the benefits of weight loss. Others will not. Or cannot? You can watch anti-GLP vloggers become hysterical before your eyes because GLPs have taken away their fix. Many list a panoply of symptoms allegedly caused by one of the drugs that have no substantiation in the medical literature. In one video, a YouTuber admits she’s hysterical and “not a very balanced person” but has no idea how hysterical she is, nor that she’s a hypochondriac. The protagonist in The Whale did most of his scarfing during panic attacks. Mind, often the stressor in fat people is being fat. Both directly and from all the bad things that being overweight causes. But if food is your therapy, you’ll have to find another one. So perhaps the “perfect” weight loss drug allows the consumption of more food. That was the promise of stimulant drugs like amphetamines and Orlistat (Xenical), which keep about a third of consumed fat from being absorbed but can have nasty side effects. Metabolism boosters, including caffeine, appear to have some effect but too much causes shakiness, hallucinations, and other nasties. Is perceiving your hair to be full of spiders worth it? You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. (Which, yes, is better stated in reverse.) The GLP-1 agonists we have now have proved stunningly effective initially for diabetes, then weight loss, then various serious diseases independently of weight loss, and just keep improving. The supplies must go up, and the prices for Americans must come down. We’re literally dying for it. Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, journalist, and former paratrooper who has written for National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, The American Spectator, Human Events, Forbes, Reason, Policy Review, the Spectator (London), the Sunday Times of London, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, and many other publications. The post We Unlocked the Secret to Beating Obesity. It’s Time to Act Like It. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Nearly 14 months after the first of four unprecedented criminal prosecutions against former President Donald Trump commenced in earnest, the Democrat-lawfare complex got its man: The Soviet show trial in “Justice” Juan Merchan’s dingy New York City courtroom produced its preordained “guilty” verdict. It is perhaps hackneyed to observe that, in convicting and seeking to incarcerate a former president and current leading presidential candidate, we have “crossed the Rubicon.” Well … Did we not cross a Rubicon when the demonic Obama administration sued the nuns — yes, literal nuns — of the Little Sisters of the Poor to force them to subsidize abortifacients? Did we not cross a Rubicon when Democrats threw out 4,000–5,000 years of “innocent until proven guilty” civilizational norms to derail the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh? Did we not cross a Rubicon when then-vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris solicited funds to bail out anarchic Antifa-Black Lives Matter street hooligans? Did we not cross a Rubicon when the American Stasi — sorry, the FBI — raided Mar-a-Lago over a document dispute? Did we not cross a Rubicon when myriad Trump attorneys, including the renowned scholar John Eastman, were prosecuted for practicing the legal profession? Did we not cross a Rubicon when Peter Navarro or Steve Bannon (just now) were ordered to jail? The Rubicon, truthfully, is a shallow, inconsequential river in Italy. That it is so shallow helps explain why Julius Caesar was able to cross it so easily. At this juncture in American history, it no longer suffices to speak of crossing a Rubicon. We are now rapidly crossing great seas — perhaps even circumnavigating the globe. You might call President Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrat-lawfare complex our modern-day Magellans. Ruinous or not, however, their precedent has now been set. And that raises the obvious question: For Democrats, will all of this, and especially their multifront anti-Trump lawfare, prove to be worth it? That obvious question, in turn, has an equally obvious answer: absolutely, positively not. First, Democrats do not seem to be getting much of a bump in the early polls after last week’s verdict. In each of the two major national polls that have been conducted exclusively after the verdict, from pollsters Emerson College and Morning Consult, Trump leads by one point. As even the liberal Washington Post conceded on Thursday, “Other polls conducted before and after the verdict suggest between no change and a two-point shift toward Biden. The shifts are quite a bit smaller than pretrial polls suggested they could be.” Considering that Trump was already leading in most national horse race polling and that the Republican Party currently has a built-in Electoral College advantage wherein its presidential candidate can slightly lose the popular vote while still prevailing in the electoral vote, the Biden–Harris campaign ought to be worried. Democrats’ lawfare isn’t winning over many swing voters. Second, the damage the Democrat-lawfare complex has caused to the American public’s faith and trust in the justice system is simply astronomical — and likely irreparable. Even prior to the onslaught of Trump indictments filed last year, many of us “deplorables” were already convinced we have a two-tier system of justice in this country: Consider the wholly disparate prosecutorial treatment of the BLM-Antifa rioters and the “J6-ers” present during the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol jamboree, for instance. But the Democrat-lawfare complex’s serial overreaches have now removed any doubt as to the blatant impartiality and patent unfairness of our regnant legal order. It is impossible not to be jaded or cynical. Leviticus 19:15 commands: “You shall commit no injustice in judgment; you shall not favor a poor person or respect a great man; you shall judge your fellow with righteousness.” Does anyone think this describes America today? Third, the Right finally seems to be snapping out of its long lull and beginning to gear itself for pitched battle against a domestic foe that wants to punish us, prosecute us, subjugate us, and remove us from the entirety of American public life. That portends poorly for leftists. My friend John Yoo, the Bush-era Justice Department official and law professor normally a bit less pugnacious than yours truly, opined: “Repairing this breach of constitutional norms will require Republicans to follow the age-old maxim: Do unto others as they have done unto you.” Megyn Kelly, the influential broadcaster who has had a complex relationship with Trump going back to the 2016 GOP presidential primary, said after the verdict: “I’m going to utter words I never thought I would utter in my life: We need Steve Bannon.” The famously combative Bannon appears headed for an unjust four-month prison sentence in a few weeks, but her point stands. Democrats have no idea what they have unleashed. Perhaps worse, they don’t even care. To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: Branding Trump — And His Voters The post Democrats Will Not Benefit From Their Own Republic-Destabilizing Lawfare appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

On the 80th anniversary of the greatest liberation campaign in the history of the world, the president of the United States and his left-wing speechwriters felt it necessary to bring up the supposedly “unjust limitations” on what women in the military at the time “could do for their nation.” When the beaches in Normandy were stormed, the United States military operated as a meritocracy. Only the strongest units of the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, and the 29th Infantry, including the 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions, were chosen to take the beach at Normandy. Men who did not meet the stringent physical and psychological requirements for such an arduous mission were excluded. By highlighting this supposed injustice, the president inadvertently shed light on the ridiculous notion of denying biology in favor of social reengineering. The truth is evident: men are built for warfare, and women are built differently. The controversy over males competing in female athletics should not be ignored by military planners and advocates of a genderless society. Moreover, the divine plan of being fruitful and covering the earth is embedded into our very being. Of course, men and women are ontologically equal in terms of being, worth, and personhood. However, in terms of pure value for the reproduction of the species, the female is more valuable. She has a limited capacity for giving birth, whereas the male has an almost limitless ability to establish his seed. This is one reason why women and children go on the lifeboats first. It is a matter of honor born of Christian faith reflecting biological facts. In terms of physical protection of the species, males are designed for the job. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a critical place for women in the defense of the home or nation. There most certainly is. But it does mean that we recognize differences and fight to win. All of this is basic to human existence. The fact that we have to reiterate the obvious says much about how far we have lost our way. When an intruder attacks your home, you expect the men — your father and any older brothers — to take the lead in defense. The reality is that most likely, the threat is a male, and the strongest possible defense is needed. Tradition and common sense dictate that women and children are protected first in emergencies because of their critical role in the survival of the species. Beyond biological and theological reasons, it was simply inappropriate to raise any issue of injustice on this significant day. The remaining veterans, now averaging 100 years old, deserve a day of honor and gratitude. Instead, the president made a significant blunder — not due to incoherent mumbling, shuffling, or tripping over an extension cord — but a deliberate, planned, and forced error. His speech was intended to rival Ronald Reagan’s iconic “the boys of Pointe du Hoc.” It did not come close. Instead, Biden’s D-Day speech will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. The post Biden Makes Inappropriate Comment in D-Day Speech appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.