Oh-oh-oh-Ozempic: We Have a Drug for That . . .

And the princess and his pe-nis. Those and other stories on your For Funk's Sake Friday.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Friday. The world isn’t funny right now. It’s scary as hell to be quite frank. But if we’re going down, we’re going down laughing and spitting in their eyes.

So to that end, my peeps . . .

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It’s time again for we’re all going to die from climate change why aren’t we dying from climate change?

The newest term to add to your lexicon to impress all your friends: “the warming hole.”

LAST MONTH, A strange atmospheric phenomenon spread over the central United States: a brutal, self-perpetuating “heat dome.”¹ Hot air descended onto the region, sucking the moisture out of soils and plants, and raising ground temperatures higher and higher. On August 23, Chicago hit a heat index (temperature combined with humidity) of 116 degrees Fahrenheit.

Stranger still? This was really out of character for the central US. Unlike the western and eastern parts of the country, daytime summer temperatures haven’t really warmed here since the mid-20th century. Scientists call this a “warming hole”—a blip in the overall heating trend across the US. But that doesn’t mean global warming has somehow skipped the central US: In a weird twist, climate change may be partly responsible for this gap.

“There’s a significant population that lives and works in this part of the US that scratches its head and says, ‘What’s all this fuss about climate change?’” says Martin Hoerling, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “It’s very counterintuitive, because global warming has accelerated while the warming hole has continued.” 

I hate to tell Martin Heorling, but many of us scratch our heads and wonder “What’s all this fuss about climate change?” and we don’t live in the hole. So what’s their explanation, other than they haven’t quite figured out how to massage the numbers for this area yet?

Scientists have several theories for why this warming hole has persisted. Maybe aerosols in the region’s atmosphere reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space. Perhaps agricultural land, and its accompanying irrigation, water-cool the area. The landscape “sweats,” much like your body would.

In a new paper, Hoerling and his colleagues argue for something similar: Summertime precipitation across the central US has dramatically increased over the past two decades compared to the years 1957 to 2000, and that has boosted the amount of water on the landscape, acting as an evaporative cooler.

Almost as if the planet regulates itself to find a balance.

Oh, sorry. Not part of the narrative.

But alas, we all are doomed anyway.

Don’t expect the warming hole to last much longer, though. Summer heat waves will eventually get more frequent and intense in the central US, though at a pace somewhat slower than in other parts of the country, according to modeling done by the team. “We looked into the future and found [that] essentially by 2040, 2050 … the probability of Dust Bowl–like extreme temperatures will become very much more probable,” says [Zachary] Labe [of Princeton].

“Very much more probable” in 2040, 2050.

I have news for Mr. Labe. The way things are going right now across the pond, I’m not too much worried about how to celebrate my fiftieth birthday in 2025 much less my sixty-fifth or seventy-fifty. I’ll be thanking my lucky stars to see 2030. If we make it that far, I’ll worry about the “Dust Bowl-like extreme temperatures” that are “very much more probable” then.

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Airborne lead levels in the US have declined an impressive 99 percent since 1980 thanks to Environmental Protection Agency regulations, but leaded gas isn’t gone completely. While large jet aircraft do not use leaded fuel, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, over 220,000 smaller, piston-engine aircraft capable of carrying between two and 10 people still run on leaded aviation gasoline, or “avgas.” 

Today, the EPA took its first step towards attempting to finally phase out air transportation’s lingering lead holdouts with a new endangerment finding announcement highlighting the adverse effects of even minuscule levels of airborne lead. With the new findings, the EPA argues that leaded avgas endangers public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act—and because of this, the US could finally see its first-ever avgas lead limitations.

This same organization could barely lift a finger when a train derailed in Ohio and the rail company did this . . .

From ABC News.

Leave little Evermore alone.

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Finally, a bit of tree-hugging I can get behind . . .

Leaf litter, commonly considered an eyesore, is a surprising microcosm of biodiversity. It serves as a cover for the most species-rich habitat: soil, which hosts more than half of all life on earth. Beneath piles of leaves, twigs, and bark, a variety of creatures flourish, from small reptiles such as salamanders and frogs to invertebrates like snails, earthworms, and spiders.

When invertebrates consume leaf matter, they break it up into smaller pieces. Then, tandem forces of bacteria and fungi decompose these pieces and convert them into valuable nutrients such as nitrogen, calcium, and sulfur that helps feed trees and other plants.

Sorry, honey, I can’t clean up the yard. I’m preserving the earth one un-collected leaf at a time.

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At least 189 dead and decaying bodies were recovered from the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado this week — that’s roughly 75 more decedents than police originally believed to be onsite when they began investigating the facility this month. 

Police first searched the funeral home, located roughly 30 miles south of Colorado Springs in the town of Penrose, on Oct. 3, after receiving a report of strong odors coming from the building.

Can you imagine being that neighbor?

According to its website, Return to Nature offers green and natural burial services, which allow bodies to decompose underground, without the use of metal caskets or chemicals. 

Well, they got it half right.

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The New York Times is having a bad week . . .

The badge was the only symbol distinguishing the Times’ 55-million-follower account from impostors amid two major global conflicts in Israel and Ukraine. X has hosted and helped amplify a flood of false information related to the Israel-Gaza war, some of which Musk has personally endorsed.

The badge was removed Tuesday without notice, a person familiar with the change said. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, CNN, Bloomberg, Vox and other news organizations still had their gold badges as of Thursday afternoon. Times accounts related to coverage of world news, health and other subjects still show “verified” badges.

Two things here:

One . . . the New York Times is an imposter of an actual journalistic endeavor (not that an actual journalistic endeavor exists this day at any sort of scale), so the gold star, um, I mean gold badge is meaningless, other than warn you that you are getting information from an approved propaganda source. So the NYT should be thankful. Someone might make the mistake of reading it now and thinking it does actual reporting.

Two . . .

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I don’t need to read the article to know the answers. In order . . . no, no, and it depends. Do you have an election coming up?²

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The economy is doing just fine. Why do you ask?

So what we’re saying is the median home price is unaffordable for even the middle class unless you’re in the top one-third.³

I don’t know why people are so pessimistic on the economy. I just don’t get it.

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And you know what happens to American workers when immigrants come and work off the books for BS wages? They just “take it and take it.” Welcome to the club, Jack.

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Speaking of “laborers” . . .

It’s easy to forget that this season is also the first in which films will have to meet the Academy’s inclusion standards to be eligible for an Oscar, which have been simultaneously hailed as a bold step toward greater representation and too inconsequential for anyone to worry about. 

Ah, yes, Hollywood wouldn’t want to miss its yearly chance to virtue signal.

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From the Atlantic, because we always have to have an “Atlantic” story . . .

Very likely, this person was a “Dark Triad” personality. The term was coined by the psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in 2002 for people with three salient personality characteristics: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and a measurable level of psychopathy. . . .

But at least these people are rare, right? Wrong. Dark Triads counted for about one in 14 people in an international population sample. . .

More useful for the other 93 percent of us is advice on how to identify and avoid Dark Triads. The traits to look for are self-importance, a sense of entitlement, vanity, a victim mentality, a tendency to bend the truth or even openly lie, manipulativeness, grandiosity, a lack of remorse, and an absence of empathy.⁴

Lillia, why did you put an article about “Dark Triads” after an article about Hollywood?

Because I didn’t have an article about Congress or the MSM this week.⁵

Dark Triads involved in politics create a lot of damage, because narcissists are motivated by self-aggrandizement over public service, and psychopaths are drawn to extreme positions in a radicalized society. So watch out for Dark Triad personalities on the fringes of political and social causes (of either the right-wing or left-wing variety).

I hate to tell the Atlantic, but it ain’t the “fringes” we have to worry about. The “civilized, norm-following, Democracy™-loving Elephant and Ass Show” is almost totally made up of these types.

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Speaking of abhorrent personages (this one’s not a “Dark Traid,” just a hysterical attention-seeker) . . .

In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.

I’m not going any further other than to say that when Trump was president, we weren’t facing two very good opportunities for World War III.

General Mark Milley is the man who concerns himself with “white rage” and set up back channels with China of all places to warn them of an “insurrection” here because Trump might “push the button.”

I’m not an expert, but I don’t think Trump is the unstable one.

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It’s not the Europeans. I would have guessed wrong too.

People in East Asia, notably, tend to have more Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, but why they have more has long baffled scientists.

That's because Neanderthals are thought to have mostly been European. Some Neanderthal remains were found as far East as the Altai Mountains of Siberia, but their bones are usually found in European countries.

The logical conclusion would be that the first children of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals would have been born in Europe. The next logical step is that Neanderthal DNA would get more diluted as Homo sapiens mingled with other humans and hominins when they spread away from the area where Neanderthals lived.

“So what's puzzling is that an area where we’ve never found any Neanderthal remains, there's more Neanderthal DNA,” study author Mathias Currat, a geneticist at the University of Geneva, told CNN.

So, as for the question you want to know the answer to, how is Europe not the hotbed of Neanderthal genetics . . .

Their study found that up to about 20,000 years ago, European genomes were indeed richer in Neanderthal DNA than the Asian genomes they have on record.

But that proportion shifted about 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. What the scientists think happened then is that a group of farming Homo sapiens from Anatolia, now Western Turkey, started mixing with hunter-gatherers in Western Europe.

These farmers had a little less Neanderthal in them, so Western Europeans lost some of that ancestry as they mixed, Currat said, per CNN.

Well, there you go. Thank you, farming Homo sapiens from Anatolia for just slightly reducing my Neanderthal-ness, though given the somewhat well-earned stereotype of drive and intelligence in Asian societies . . . we might want to think about how we characterize Neanderthal DNA little harder.

Those are some twisted scientists.

On the other hand, give me a minute while I scribble some notes for a book.⁶

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After graduating, Toto felt mentally “tapped out” in science and needed a break. She worked as an educator at a science center while doing drag shows on the side before she decided to really focus on her craft. Now Toto is a full-time drag queen and DJ based in Chicago. But she still gets out on the boat with the Field School every time she returns to Miami.

She and Macdonald started Drag ‘n Tag expeditions in 2021 to showcase queerness in marine science. “It can be hard for queer people in this field,” Macdonald says. “Plenty of them are very quiet about it. We want to create welcoming spaces for visual queerness.” Ticket sales and other donations for the event also raise money to support Pridelines, a charity that offers services and support for LGBTQ+ youth and community in South Florida.

And now I have an idea for a fundraiser . . .

Imagine, pay-per-view, Drag Queens vs. Great Whites . . .

Don’t worry. No one will be hurt. “Queerness in marine science” . . . the great whites will laugh their sharky behinds off at a six-foot plus, three hundred pound dood in makeup and stilettos and big hard. Said shark will get a cramp in his or her side, lose the capacity to swim, and drown. It’s not even a fair fight.⁷

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Not that I disagree, but . . .

There’s new pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to take action on the synthetic food coloring, red No. 3, after California passed a law to ban it last week.

California became the first state to ban four food additives, including red No. 3, and public health advocates are pushing to remove the dye from the food supply nationwide. “I think the passage of the bill in California creates undeniable pressure on the FDA,” says Dr. Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

California is the state that proposed taking children from parents if they wouldn’t give their children hormones and cut off body parts because said children “identified” as the opposite gender.

So in California, little girls can get puberty blockers in their applesauce but not red No. 3 in their cupcake frosting.

And that’s what one-party blue-state rule gets you.

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LARAMIE, Wyo. — The morning sky was still dark as Artemis Langford’s father hoisted the last of her belongings into her car for the drive back to college.

“Be safe,” he told her.

“I will,” she promised.

She didn’t mention how a day earlier, as she scrolled through social media comments, she saw someone had called her a “sicko” who should be torn apart in a woodchipper. Or how she discovered her name on neo-Nazi websites. Or how news stories about her had been posted on a forum for gun owners, alongside a hangman’s noose.

“What on earth?” you’re thinking, right? Why would they be persecuting a college student like this?

It wasn’t what she imagined last year when she joined Kappa Kappa Gamma at the University of Wyoming . . .

I knew “Greek life” could be cruel, but yeesh.

becoming the first transgender woman in the state to be inducted into a sorority.

Ah, well, that kind of . . . explains . . . things. “She” has a penis. Pronoun trouble. All this would have been settled had WaPo been using the appropriate male pronoun.

He joining a sorority is a totally different beast, and one can understand the ire of the “she’s.”

Instead, she became a target.

Can’t understand why. (That’s sarcasm, by the way.)

You know, what I really love about this article. The fleeting moment of honesty . . .

So on an early morning in late August, Artemis, wearing a black dress and denim jacket, got in her car, shut the door and backed out of her father’s driveway. She drove quickly, not stopping once in six hours to eat or use the bathroom. She worried how others in rural Wyoming might perceive her.

“I don’t pass well,” she said. “I’ve always been tall and heavy.”

“I don’t pass well.”

So “Artemis” just admitted he’s not a woman. No woman has to “pass.” Women can be tall and heavy and no one questions their gender. To say you’re “passing” as something is to admit you aren’t it.

Which is to admit that you had no business applying to a women’s organization.

Some of the young women at the sorority sued. They lost the suit.

Why you ask?

“With its inquiry beginning and ending there, the court will not define ‘woman’ today,” the judge concluded.

According to the New York Post,

“The University of Wyoming chapter voted to admit — and, more broadly, a sorority of hundreds of thousands approved — Langford,” he continued.

“The delegate of a private, voluntary organization interpreted ‘woman,’ otherwise undefined in the nonprofit’s bylaws, expansively; this Judge may not invade Kappa Kappa Gamma’s freedom of expressive association and inject the circumscribed definition Plaintiffs urge.”

So the girls who joined couldn’t assume that a sorority founded in . . . [Google search of Kappa Kappa Gamma]

1870, when Ulysses S. Grant (No. 18) was president, defined a “woman” as, well, a woman and they therefore might have a legitimate complaint about the sudden change in “rules.” Some things kind of go without saying.

Before you jump to any conclusions about the judge, back to the WaPo:

The first thing they noticed were the pronouns — “she,” “her” — used by Judge Alan B. Johnson, an 84-year-old man who had been appointed during the Reagan administration.

There goes that theory that with age comes wisdom.

Leave it to a misogynistic dirty old man to cover for a misogynistic dirty young man.

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PharmaLand, a place where a pill cures everything.

Ozempic is arguably the world’s most famous drug, a diabetes treatment turned miracle weight-loss cure that’s rocketed up the sales chart despite supply constraints. This may be only the beginning.

Recent studies have started to illuminate the far-reaching benefits of Ozempic and other medicines in the same class, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists. The drugs appear to have a protective effect on the heart, liver and kidneys in addition to helping people lose weight, which in itself reduces the risk of many ailments. There’s also reason to believe GLP-1s could help combat substance abuse or even Alzheimer’s disease.

That’s bad news for a broad spectrum of makers of drugs and devices. For example, Americans spend about $250 billion a year treating cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the US. That includes what insurers and patients pay for blood pressure medicines, bypass surgery and implantable cardiac devices such as pacemakers. Analysts at Wells Fargo Securities⁸ estimate that GLP-1s could reduce the market for cardiovascular disease treatments about 10% by 2050.

I wonder how much the makers of Ozempic paid Bloomberg for this advertisement. *taps chin*

So let’s see the logic here: we have this one drug that could eliminate all these other drugs, and that’s good because all these other drugs are expensive, and Ozempic . . .

Oh, shoot. I found that in my couch yesterday. Pennies, I tell you.

Do you know how Ozempic works?

Ozempic works by mimicking a naturally occurring hormone. As those hormone levels rise, the molecules go to your brain, telling it you’re full. It also slows digestion by increasing the time it takes for food to leave the body. This is similar to the effect of bariatric surgery.

When using Ozempic to treat diabetes, weight loss is a common side effect. It is designed to be taken long-term.

What is that “hormone”? One that causes your body to produce more insulin.

Do you know what happens to a person who is not diabetic if you give them insulin?

It’s the classic way to “poison” someone and not get caught, only you have to inject it, which means someone might find a needle mark.

Don’t look at me like that. I like mysteries. I’m definitely probably not trying to figure out how to off anybody and get away with it.⁹

It may be years before all the benefits of GLP-1s are known. Lorenzo Leggio, an addiction researcher at the National Institutes of Health, likens Ozempic’s development path to that of Viagra. The erectile dysfunction drug was originally developed by Pfizer Inc. for high blood pressure and chest pain, but researchers discovered its other use by accident during clinical trials. It went on to break records for fastest initial sales growth for a prescription drug.

Viagra, huh? That’s your role model?

Is Ozempic healthy for you? Who cares. It’s definitely healthy for Big Pharma’s bottom line.

But some of us crazy people might want to know the “downsides” . . .

Scientific American has a warning . . .

But how does the “Scientific American” propose to deal with these problems?

Specialists say that both gastrointestinal adverse events and muscle-mass loss can be prevented or managed with adequate dietary modifications, physical activity and other drugs.

Call me crazy, but “adequate dietary modifications and physical activity” sound like excellent ways to address being overweight to begin with.

And I love how we prescribe drugs to combat the ill-effects of other drugs. Seems kind of like we’re doing this . . .

But don’t worry, if you die of thyroid cancer or pancreatic cancer or a blocked intestine, you’ll leave a beautiful, skinny corpse.

Just don’t let the Return to Nature funeral home of Penrose, Colorado, handle it.

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The pickings were slimmer this week, unless I wanted to go into the ludicrousness of war,¹⁰ and I didn’t, so . . . the pickings were slimmer this week. But I hope you enjoyed it anyway.

I have a special message for Libertarian: Thank you for recommending my Friday roundup on Notes last week. I got roughly a dozen new subscribers. You keep asking what anyone can do to help. That’s what anyone can do to help. And I’m honored that you like what I write well enough to put yourself behind it.

That’s my “marketing plan” in a nutshell. I write things worth reading and discussing, and that I write things worth reading and discussing gets around, and I get more subscribers, and we get more people to solve the world’s problems (or at least vent about them, sometimes with sharp wit, in the comments section), and this thing grows. And thank you so much, Libertarian, for helping me do that.

And now for your spoonful of sugar . . .

This man is our commander-in-chief, the big cheese, the generalissimo to bravely lead us all into battle against the forces of evil . . .

If that doesn’t make you laugh hysterically, nothing will.

Have a good weekend, all. I’ll see you on the flipside.

1. Here’s another one: “heat dome.”

2. Since it’s hard for you to access this article, is this version of COVID more severe?

That’s the big question. And by severe disease, we mean being so sick that a sufferer needs supplementary oxygen or to be admitted to hospital; not just a really bad head cold that leaves you feeling drained for a few days. 

The problem is that there haven’t yet been enough reported infections to tell us anything about the symptom profile. But what we have seen with each successive wave of new variants since the appearance of Omicron back in November 2021 is that, by and large, each has caused less-severe disease than earlier variants. 

There are good reasons for that. First, most of us in the UK have already had at least two infections of COVID-19. And second, if you’ve been vaccinated and you’ve also had an infection, which many of us now have, you’ve got what’s called hybrid immunity. That provides really good protection against severe disease. 

I expect that to be the case with this variant, too. But again, until we’ve seen more cases, we can’t be definitive. 

Translation: it’s relatively harmless, but we have to keep the grift going.

3. After I took the screenshot, I thought that article must be old. Those numbers seem so out of whack with what you would need to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle with the prices I see for utilities, cars, gas, home, groceries, etc.

Nope, it was published October 19, 2023, which is to say yesterday. Chew on that for a while.

4. You can actually take a test to find out if you’re a “Dark Triad.” They tell you not to share your results. I’m average for Americans on Machiavellian and very low on narcissism and psychopathy. I’m actually surprised about the psychopathy.

5. Okay, the NYT on its own doesn’t count. We need Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow for sure, with perhaps a dose of the View and Joy Reid.

6. Yes, I know. Jean M. Auel beat me to it. But I can improve it. The Croods meets Fifty Shades of Grey . . . I think I might have a hit.

7. Just kind of an FYI here, from an expert on grammar and semantics. Not to embarrass the vaunted Scientific American, but the correct pronoun here should be “he” and for more than the usual reason. A “drag queen” is a man (a “he”) dressed up as a “she.” That’s the whole schtick. A “drag queen” can’t be a “she.” Otherwise, “she’s” not a drag queen. “She’s” just a downright unpleasant lookin’ woman with horrid fashion sense.

8. And we all know we can trust Wells Fargo, amirite?

9. For the simple reason that the people the world could do without, and are therefore the most worth the personal risk to myself of removing, are the most protected. I’d never get near them with a needle. No, I mostly haven’t thought about this. (In case the FBI is reading, I am joking.)

10. Did you know it’s okay to bomb civilians as long as you warn them? I just learned that.