#ozempic list

[saintlaurentproblems]

abel gaga and camila on ozempic wow

brie larson and anne hathaway too

Ozempic Celebs (Assumption)

Anne Hathaway

Brie Larson

The Weeknd

Mindy Kaling

Camila Cabello

Lady Gaga

Demi Lovato

Kim Kardashian

Khloe Kardashian

Kylie Jenner

Kris Jenner

Billie Eilish

Adele

[an-absolute-trainwreck]

When’s this guy gonna come out with a drake diss track

[tranquil-slaughterhouse]

Uh...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Brinklump Linkdump

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Life comes at you fast, links come at you faster. Once again, I've arrived at Saturday with a giant backlog of links I didn't fit in this week, so it's time for a linkdump, the 14th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

It's the Year of Our Gourd twenty and twenty-four and holy shit, is rampant corporate power rampant. On January 1, the inbred droolers of Big Pharma shat out their annual price increases, as cataloged in 46Brooklyn's latest Brand Drug List Price Change Box Score:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/branddrug-boxscore

Here's the deal: drugs that have already been developed, brought to market, and paid off are now getting more expensive. Why? Because the pharma companies have "pricing power," the most reliable indicator of monopoly. Ed Cara rounds up the highlights for Gizmodo:

https://gizmodo.com/ozempic-wegovy-wellbutrin-oxycontin-drug-price-increase-1851179427

What's going up? Well, Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists. These drugs have made untold billions for their manufacturers, so naturally, they're raising the price. That's how markets work, right? When firms increase the volume of a product, the price goes up? Right? Other drugs that are going up include Wellbutrin (an antidepressant that's also widely used in smoking cessation) and the blood thinner Plavix. I mean, why the hell not? These companies get billions in research subsidies, invaluable government patent privileges, and near-total freedom to abuse the patent system with evergreening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/23/everorangeing/#taste-the-rainbow

The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It's like these guys can't even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that's how you get guillotines.

Take Apple. They just got their asses handed to them in court by Epic, who successfully argued that Apple's rule requiring everyone who sells through the App Store to use Apple's payment processor and pay Apple 30% out of every dollar they bring in was an antitrust violation. Epic won, then won the appeal, then SCOTUS told Apple they wouldn't hear the case, so that's that.

Right? Wrong. Apple's pulled a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran. Apple has announced that app companies that process transactions using their own payment processors on the web must still pay Apple a 27% fee for every dollar their process:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-rule-changes-draw-sharp-rebuke-from-critics-150047160.html

In addition, Apple will throw a terrifying FUD-screen up every time a user clicks a payment link that goes to the web:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

This is obviously not what the court had in mind, and there's no way this will survive the next court challenge. It's just Apple making sure that everyone knows it hates us all and wants us to die. Thanks, Tim Apple, and right back atcha.

Not to be outdone in the monopolistic mustache-twirling department, Ubisoft just announced that it is going to shut down its driving simulator game The Crew, which it sold to users with a "perpetual license":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU

This is some real Darth Vader MBA shit. "Yeah, we sold you a 'perpetual license' to this game, but we're terminating it. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Ubisoft sure are innovators. They've managed the seemingly impossible feat of hybridizing Darth Vader and Immortan Joe. Ubisoft's head of subscriptions, the guillotine-ready Philippe Tremblay, told GamesIndustry.biz that gamers need to get "comfortable" with "not owning their games":

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games

Or, as Immortan Joe put it: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"

Capitalism without constraint is enshittification's handmaiden, and the latest victim is Ello, the "indie" social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users. When Ello took VC and Andy Baio questioned how this could be squared with this promise, the founders mocked him and others for raising the question. Their response boiled down to "we are super-chill dudes and you can totally trust us."

They raised more capital, and used that to create a nice place for independent artists, who piled into the platform and provided millions of unpaid hours of creative labor to help the founders increase its value. The founders and their investors turned the company into a Public Benefit Corporation, which meant they had an obligation to serve the public benefit.

But then they took more investment money and simply (and silently) sold their assets to a for-profit. Struggling to raise capital, the founders opted to secretly sell the business to a sleazy branding company called Talenthouse. Its users didn't know about the change, though the site sure had a lot of Talenthouse design competitions all of a sudden.

Finally, the company announced the change as the last founders left. Rather than announcing that the new owners were untrustworthy scum, warning their users to get their data and get out, the founders posted oblique, ominous statements to Instagram. The company started stiffing the winners of those design competitions. Then, one day, poof, Ello disappeared, taking all its users' data with it. Poof:

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

I'm sure the founders' decisions each seemed reasonable at the moment. That's every terrible situation arises: you rationalize that a single compromise isn't that big of a deal, and then you do the same for the next compromise, and the next, and the next. Pretty soon, you're betraying everyone who believed in you.

One answer to this is "Ulysses pacts": making binding commitments to do right before you are tempted. Throw away all your Oreos when you go on a diet and you can't be tempted to eat a whole sleeve of them at 2AM. License your software under the GPL and your investors can't force you to make it proprietary. Set up a warrant canary and the feds can't force you to keep their spying secret:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

If the founders were determined to build a trustworthy, open, independent company, they could have published their quarterly books, livestreamed their staff meetings, built data-export tools that emailed users every week with a link to download everything they'd posted since the last week. Merely halting any of these practices would have been a signal that things were wrong. Anyone who says they won't be tempted in the moment to make a "reasonable" compromise in the hopes of recovering whatever they're trading away by living to fight another day is bullshitting you, and possibly themself.

The inability to project the consequences of your bad decisions in the future is the source of endless mischief and heartbreak. Take movie projectors. A couple decades ago, the studio cartel established a standard for digital movie distribution to cinematic exhibitors called the Digital Cinema Initiative. Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard.

Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to "secure" projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into "Digital Cinema Prints" for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.

Over time, the ability to use unencrypted files was stripped away, meaning every DCP needed to be encrypted, and every projector needed to have up-to-date decryption keys. This system broke down on Jan 1, 2024, and cinemas all over the world found they couldn't play Wonka. Many just shut down for the day and refunded their customers:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

The problem? Something that every PKI system has to wrangle: an expired certificate from Deluxe Technicolor. The failure has been dubbed the Y2K24 debacle by projectionists and film-techs, who are furious:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/main-forum/34652-the-y2k24-bug-major-digital-outage-today

Making everything worse is that Sony mothballed the division that maintains its projectors, so there's no one who can update them to accommodate Technicolor's workaround. Struggling mom-and-pop theaters are having to junk their systems and replace them. There's plenty of blame to go around, but Sony is definitely the most negligent link in the chain. Shame on them.

Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are deeply unserious. This week, I wrote, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Score one for team deeply unserious. The multinational delivery company DPD fired its support staff and replaced them with a chatbot. The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

There once was a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help. It could not track parcels, Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time, And a customer's worst nightmare. It was so bad, That people would rather call the depot directly, Than deal with the useless chatbot.

One day, DPD was finally shut down, And everyone rejoiced. Finally, they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is…the opposite of an AI hallucination? It's AI clarity.

As with all botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean damn quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag. Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the Internet Archive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another. Think of steampunk, a subculture that wove together artists, makers, costumers, fiction writers, and tinkerers in endlessly creative ways. My old pal Roger Wood was the world's most improbable steampunk: he was a gay ex-navy gunner who grew up in a small town in the maritimes but moved to Toronto where he became the world's most accomplished steampunk clockmaker.

I was Roger's neighbour for a decade. He died last year, and I miss him all the time. I was in Toronto in December and saw a few of his last pieces being sold in galleries and I was just skewered on the knowledge that I'd never see him again, never visit his workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/16/klockwerks/#craphound

A reader just sent this five-year-old mini documentary about Roger, shot in his wonderful workshop. Watching it made me happy and sad and then happy again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMGomM8yF8

The old, good internet was so great. It was a place where every kind of passion could live. It was a real testament to the power of geeking out together, no matter how often the suits demand that we "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

The world is full of people with weird passions and I love them all, mostly. Learning about Don Bolles's collection of decades' worth of lost pet posters was a moment of pure joy (I just wish more of it was online):

https://ameliatait.substack.com/p/the-man-who-collects-lost-pet-posters

That's the future I was promised: one where every kind of freak can find every other kind of freak. Despite the nipple-deep botshit we wade through online, and the relentless cheapening of words like "innovation" and "future," there are still occasional gleams of the future I want to live in.

Like the researchers who spliced a photosynthesis gene into brewer's yeast (a fungus) and got it to photosynthesize, and to display enhanced fitness:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01744-X

As Doug Muir writes on Crooked Timber, this is pretty kooky! Fungi – the coolest of the kingdoms! – can't photosynthesize. The idea that you can just add the photosynthesis gene to a thing that can't photosynthesize and have it just kind of work is wild!

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/19/occasional-paper-purple-sun-yeast/

As Muir writes: "Animals have no evolutionary history of photosynthesis and aren’t designed for it, but the same is true for yeast. So… no reason this shouldn’t be possible. A photosynthesizing cat? Sure, why not."

Why not indeed?!

OK, that's this week's linkdump done and dusted. It only remains for me to share the news with you that the trolley problem has been finally and comprehensively solved, by Sidereal@kolektiva.social, of the IWW IU 520 (railroad workers):

Slip the switch by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/111779015415697244

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/20/melange/#i-have-heard-the-mermaids-singing

[username222isback]

⋆.*ೃ❀ summer wish list! ༉‧₊˚

- hair past my waist - permanent juicy BRONZY tan - a BIG bowl of fruit - stop rotting in bed - no feeling of hunger (haha im fr) - ozempic - 10kg less (a 4 in the front iykyk) - 1 million to magically appear on my bank account - big shopping spree - a vape - drives license (i have to wait 2/3 more year for this one)

[saintmeghanmarkle]

Meghan is currently working on her clothing colour palate for the faux Royal trip to Nigeria. She cant quite decide between: by u/Shoshana-

Meghan is currently working on her clothing colour palate for the faux Royal trip to Nigeria. She can’t quite decide between: Barely beige, Beigesque, Faded taupe,Frosted crème, Natural latte,Barely latte,Milky mocha,Desert mist,Formica fawn, Monstrous mundane, Moron magnolia,Clueless calico, Wacko wheat, Wrinkled wan, Ozempic oatmeal, Wasted willow, Loopy lychee, Delusional drearWhat do you think she will choose? What else might she have missed off her list? Note: tried to edit the wonky formatting and just made it worse! post link: https://ift.tt/2xIvSCU author: Shoshana- submitted: May 02, 2024 at 07:07PM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit disclaimer: all views + opinions expressed by the author of this post, as well as any comments and reblogs, are solely the author's own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the administrator of this Tumblr blog. For entertainment only.

[mightyflamethrower]

As you may already know, global thermonuclear war is nearly upon us, but while that may cause some people to feel depressed, you may be happy to know there are some surprising upsides.

The Babylon Bee is here to lift your spirits with the following list of perks to living through the upcoming nuclear holocaust:

No more jury duty: You may have to worry about roving gangs of mutant cannibals, but definitely not jury duty.

Your wife will have a whole new glow: You won't be able to put your finger on it, but she'll just seem… brighter.

You'll probably lose a ton of weight: Ozempic can't hold a candle to radiation poisoning.

Your morning commute will be much lighter: Hooray!

It will be much easier to get a tee time at the golf course: Just watch out for the zombies on hole 12.

Nuclear winter will finally get rid of that awful global warming: We did it, Greta!

You won't have to brush your hair any more: This just keeps sounding better.

No more mowing the grass: Thanks, apocalypse!

You can just set your microwave oatmeal out on the patio: What a perk.

You'll develop special mutant abilities, but some people won't appreciate your powers and will want to enact some sort of mutant registry and then a nice bald man in a motorized wheelchair with an underground airplane hangar will take you in and show you it's ok to be yourself: Awesome!

See? The oncoming onslaught of nuclear weapons raining down upon civilization won't necessarily be all bad. Chin up, soldier!

[skippyv20]

Meggers Banned from UK

Hi darling Skippy, I’ve never believed she was banned from Uk, we can’t keep out Jihadists and Russian Oligarths or any other form of criminal so a sad ole wannabe D list actress hooked up with a Dumb member of the RF would always be allowed airspace and entry.

He can’t come back because any member of the Aristocracy giving him houseroom is immediately blacklisted by the Family.

They could bunk up with the Clooney or the Beckham ? Oh no , because they might want knighthoods in the future? Where is a skinny Ozempic victim with a huge forehead vein and a bad wig to lay her head… Soho House? Maybe not because they don’t bring class to that particular business anymore in UK with the people who value discretion and privacy. Both of them have shown the world they can’t shut up about what they see and hear in private areas, they’ve shown Omid and his red hot Smart phone is but a text away. They don’t come back because they’re “banned”, they don’t come back because anyone who would have given them a bed for the night knows they can’t be trusted. All of the elite they were courting in America knows it too. They are the IG Royals, hawking what they have left to the “movers and shakers “ of the Sussex Squad on X Love from Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 xxx

You raised great points,  Thank you dear Scotland!  Love and hugs❤️

[the-empress-7]

She is wearing a cashmere wool coat and a scarf in 70F/21C weather 😂

I know a couple of non famous, aging models - they're super thin and they're always cold, they have no fat layer (no ozempic, just a lot of cigs and basically never eating more than a morsel in every single meal for decades), no insulation, no thermoregulation - Angelina Jolie dresses like that too.

I don't think Meghan is *that thin* yet, I think she's mostly cosplaying Jolie, trying to indicate she's part of the A-list super thin club - only nowadays the real A-list is getting healthier and more inclusive of body types, and physiques like Jolie's are no longer the ideal: Meghan is stuck in the 90s/00s again!

I agree that she isn’t scary thin yet, you know like the 90s supermodel thin? I hope she doesn’t go that thin. She is too short, and if she loses anymore weight she’d simply disappear.

[myeyesarebrighter]

My list was definitely too ambitious. I increased my sema/wegovy/ozempic dose last night and do not have much stamina today!

It’s ok. I’ll be ok with getting what I can done. I’ll make my to the top of the waves eventually. Every little kick helps.

[tearsinthemist]

Drugmakers hiked prices in first 2 weeks of 2024

19January2024

Pharmaceutical companies raised prices for their medicines by a median 4.5% at the start of 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing an analysis by 46brooklyn Research, a nonprofit drug-pricing analytics group. The list prices for widely used drugs, including Ozempic and Mounjaro, were among those hiked. Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk, Mounjaro maker Eli Lilly and other companies raised prices on 775 brand-name drugs in the first two weeks of January, according to the Journal. The increases were not as big as hikes in previous years, but still higher than inflation — which hit 3.4% in December — so they could increase scrutiny from the Biden administration as it works to reduce federal drug spending. The Wall Street Journal

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Kevin Siers cartoon: Trump fills us in on his view of the rule of law

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 5, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 06, 2024

In 1776, as British colonists in North America were contemplating how to construct a new nation, Massachusetts lawyer John Adams famously wrote to friends about the relationship between government and the law. A republic, he wrote, “is an Empire of Laws and not of Men: and therefore…that particular Arrangement…which is best calculated to Secure an exact and impartial Execution of the Laws, is the best Republic.” 

In 1787 the framers of the Constitution set out to create a nation built on the rule of law. The next year, the states ratified their new framework, and in 1789, the Constitution went into effect. One of the first acts of the newly seated Congress was to establish a federal court system. The Judiciary Act of 1789 set out the different courts and their jurisdictions. And in 1868, with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Americans explicitly wrote into the Constitution the principle that all U.S. citizens must be equal before the law. Two years later, they established the Department of Justice to make sure that principle would be honored across the country. 

In the past three years, the Biden administration has worked to confirm that the U.S. is a nation of laws. That work has borne fruit. In the past few days, several cases have jumped out in which the administration has used the law to protect ordinary Americans. 

On Tuesday, April 30, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenged more than 300 junk patent listings for drugs that treat diabetes, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and that help people lose weight, including Ozempic. Bogus patent listings prevent generic drugs from entering the market, keeping brand-name drug prices high. The FTC gives the manufacturer 20 days to withdraw or amend the listing or certify, under penalty of perjury, that they are correct. In November the FTC successfully challenged junk patents on asthma inhalers, reducing their price to $35.  

FTC chair Lina Khan said: “By challenging junk patent filings, the FTC is fighting these illegal tactics and making sure that Americans can get timely access to innovative and affordable versions of the medicines they need.”

On Thursday, May 2, Yvette Wang, the chief of staff to Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire businessman who works with Trump associate Steve Bannon (in 2020, law enforcement officers arrested Bannon on Guo’s yacht on charges of fraud), pleaded guilty to conspiring with Guo in a massive fraud scheme that involved wire fraud and money laundering and netted more than $1 billion. Wang personally will forfeit $1.4 billion to the United States and faces up to ten years in prison. The trial for Wang and Guo is scheduled to start on May 20. Guo has pleaded not guilty. 

On Friday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the auditing firm for Trump’s social media company and its owner with “massive fraud.” The SEC called BF Borgers a “sham audit mill” and said it “deliberately systemically failed to conduct” audits and reviews that were filed with the SEC between January 2021 and June 2023. Those reports are supposed to inform investors about the value of companies. The SEC fined the company $14 million and banned it from practicing accounting. Its owner, Benjamin Borgers, did not admit wrongdoing but accepted the judgment. 

Also on Friday, the Department of Justice released a grand jury’s indictment of Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) and his wife, Imelda, alleging that beginning no later than 2014 and until at least November 2021, they accepted close to $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil and gas company and a Mexican bank and then laundered the payments through Imelda’s company. In exchange, the indictment says, Cuellar agreed to adjust U.S. policy toward Azerbaijan, especially its oil industry, and to oppose laws that would curb money laundering and regulate the payday lending industry.  

On Friday, at former president Trump’s fraud trial for interfering in the 2016 election by paying $130,000 to buy the silence of adult film actress Stormy Daniels and falsifying business records to hide the payment, former White House aide Hope Hicks established that Trump had indeed intended to silence Daniels in order to stop voters from hearing her information before the election. Appearing reluctant to testify against Trump, Hicks nonetheless described a conversation with Trump in 2018, after Daniels’s story became public. Trump told her that “it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”

The rule of law protects ordinary Americans and defends their right to elect a government of their choice. But in 2024, it is under attack.

Trump continues to insist that the stories about his extramarital affairs are false, but his main strategy for addressing his many legal troubles is to insist that the justice system is rigged against him. This continues a pattern he began as soon as he took office, when he unsuccessfully pressured FBI director James Comey to drop the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s interaction with Russian operatives. Although FBI directors are supposed to be virtually untouchable during their ten-year term, Trump fired Comey and then spent the rest of his term accusing the FBI of persecuting him.

That attack on our judicial system expanded to sweep in all the judges who ruled against his campaign operatives and his extremist policies on immigration. He called the courts a “joke” and a “laughingstock” and attacked the Justice Department as a whole and judges personally.

Those attacks increased after Trump left office and was indicted for his efforts to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. An analysis by NBC News of more than 14,000 Trump posts and reposts from April 2022 to January 6, 2024, showed that in some periods he attacked the judicial system more than he promoted his campaign. He aimed his attacks most often at special counsel Jack Smith, as well as New York attorney general Letitia James; Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over Trump’s Manhattan fraud trial; Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg; and Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis—all of whom are in charge of cases against Trump.  

Reporters Dareh Gregorian and Jasmine Cui wrote: “The posts generally portray Trump as the victim of a Democratic scheme designed to derail his presidential bid, with an array of judges and prosecutors working against him at the behest of President Joe Biden, and all part of a partisan ‘witch hunt,’ a term he used about 250 times during that time period.” 

At a meeting for donors at Mar-a-Lago Saturday, Trump complained about the criminal charges against him, calling Jack Smith a “f**king a**hole,” and accused President Joe Biden of running a “Gestapo administration,” a reference to the German secret police that crushed opposition and rounded up Jews, Roma, LGBT individuals, and other targeted groups during World War II. 

Trump has vowed to take control of the Justice Department and make it serve his interests. Chris Geidner of Law Dork noted today that the federal courts already favor Republicans, and a second Trump presidency would allow him to fill multiple court vacancies, probably including some on the Supreme Court, with his extremists. They would cement the ideology of MAGA Republicans into our laws for the foreseeable future. 

Trump’s war on the Department of Justice over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election has already progressed into an attempt to delegitimize the results of the 2024 election, suggesting he does not believe he will win in a free and fair election. 

Yesterday, Charlie Spies, the Republican Party’s top lawyer, resigned after Trump turned on him for his public statements that the 2020 election was not stolen. Spies was one of three lawyers the Trump team hired in March after it took over the Republican National Committee (RNC). An establishment Republican lawyer, Spies was paired with MAGA lawyer and former right-wing One America News Network anchor Christina Bobb to oversee the RNC’s so-called election integrity unit. Now Spies is out and Bobb, who has been indicted for election fraud for her participation in the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, remains.

In an astonishing exchange on Meet the Press this morning, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), who is angling to become Trump’s vice presidential pick, refused six times to say he would accept the results of the 2024 election if Trump didn’t win. Host Kristen Welker asked: “Will you commit to accepting the election results of 2024?” Scott responded: “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump.” Welker followed up: “Yes or no, will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter who wins?” Scott answered: “That is my statement.” 

When Welker continued to push the question, Scott accused NBC of working for the “Democrat Party” but refused ever to agree to the peaceful transition of power, which, as Welker noted, is the hallmark of the democratic republic people like John Adams established in 1789.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[nathanialhowe]

putting together a list of some of my favourite reads from 2023:

Ozempic, Barbie, and the failure of corporate feminism

Read This Before You Buy That Sweater

Vladimir Nabokov's Butterflies

Inside the Pages of a Medieval Sketchbook

how come these ghosts is white?

Is 5G Going to Kill Us All?

Mattel, Malibu Stacy, and the Dialectics of the Barbie Polemic

I'm a fake brand, in a fake world: The secrets behind designing a great fictional brand for TV and film

What is Brutalist Architecture?

With 'The Far Side', Gary Larson Pioneered the Art of the Meme

A Star Reporter's Break With Reality

Walt Disney cheated his animators out of profits--and their strike changed the world

When Your Parents Are Dying

Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)

A Year Later, I Still Can't Stop Thinking About Disco Elysium

Dune Has a Desert Problem

Time Loop Narratives Are About Love

[naturalrights-retard]

If the food-industrial complex had not flooded the nation's food supply with junk, if the government actively encouraged healthy lifestyles, and if efforts to address the obesity crisis didn't rely solely on 'miracle weight loss drugs' pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, then maybe - just maybe - politicians wouldn't be clamoring on Capitol Hill, or the elderly (somewhat senile) president in the White House, about out-of-control drug prices.

But since common sense has vanished in America and folks have given up on Peloton bikes for $1,000 monthly injections of "Wegovy," the blockbuster weight loss treatment (also a diabetes drug called "Ozempic") from Novo Nordisk, then socialists, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), wouldn't be reviving the discussion about high drug prices. 

"Today, a new Yale study found that Ozempic costs less than $5 a month to manufacture. And yet, Novo Nordisk charges Americans nearly $1,000 a month for this drug, while the same exact product can be purchased for just $155 a month in Canada and just $59 in Germany," Sanders said in a statement.

Sanders cited the study "Estimated Sustainable Cost-Based Prices for Diabetes Medicines," conducted by researchers at Yale University, King's College Hospital in London, and the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders. It was published in the journal JAMA Network Open on Wednesday. 

In the study, researchers found Novo could produce the blockbuster drug for 89 cents to $4.73 per month, as opposed to the monthly retail price of about $1,349 for Wegovy, a semaglutide injection. 

"As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), I am calling on Novo Nordisk to lower the list price of Ozempic — and the related drug Wegovy — in America to no more than what they charge for this drug in Canada," Sander said. 

He added: "The American people are sick and tired of paying, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs while the pharmaceutical industry enjoys huge profits."

Sanders warned: "This outrageously high price has the potential to bankrupt Medicare, the American people and our entire health care system.

[saintmeghanmarkle]

TW has a "brand" she just doesn't know it yet by u/Cat_Woman_238

TW has a "brand," she just doesn't know it yet CDAN ENTY attorney really pegs TW as ambitious to the max... driven... ready to try anything to achieve success... hungry for fame, money, and power! He pegs TOS or "this one" as fine smoking weed all day, every day, without achieving anything. Isn't that what the landed gentry are brought up expecting to do? Yes, many aristocrats have to roll up their sleeves and work hard to save the family estate, but that is not the issue in his case. TOS was brought up to the life of leisure. ENTY pegs him as a "star-****er," a man amazed to think he is sleeping with a person he has seen on tv. That's where TOS went wrong. TW oversold herself and TOS bought her story, and then felt very fortunate to stick his **** in a woman he had seen on tv.Sure, she has drive and she is good at networking. But imagine a person with her drive who is also a woman of good taste, good breeding, good manners. Imagine a woman with that drive who gets a law or medical degree, works hard, shows humility, extends gratitude to those who help her, uses her good fortune to advance a cause we can all support, and networks like crazy - imagine what THAT woman could do! That is the woman TOS thought he was getting.Instead he got a woman with no manners, no taste, no breeding, and without the savvy to understand the importance of showing her gratitude to those who have elevated her. Even if she networks, hob-knobs, and sashays, she offends everyone she meets. People are repulsed by her ambition to be "famous" at any cost, and to make "billions" by lending her name to things other people do. People want to follow a leader, like the kind of leader who leads men into battle. He does not stand on the sidelines and say, "You go over there." No, he's the one out ahead of the others, going to battle. Catherine is a leader. She says, "Let's find out about early child development," and people follow her on that journey and accept what she learns as they learn with her. The fact that she is beautiful and charming make the journey more pleasant, but the fact is that she is leading the charge to understand the topic and to support good measures for child development. TW, on the other hand, cannot seem to understand that people like Catherine's genuine interest in things other than herself. She is like a gorgeous, athletic signpost, pointing to something of greater importance than herself - the nation's children. If she started to point towards herself, interest would wane. Michelle Obama pointed to the importance of exercise and healthy weight. Laura Bush pointed to the importance of reading and literacy. Jackie Kennedy pointed to the importance of the interior decor of the White House. Jane Goodall pointed to the importance of protecting primates. What has TW pointed towards? The importance of plastic surgery and Ozempic for the D-list actress?Instead of a savvy, intelligent, attractive, ambitious, clued-in partner, TOS got himself an ambitious but clueless woman who believes in nothing but herself. That's why she offended the most powerful woman in the world, and her heirs. That's why she failed to take any interest in the culture that offered her the biggest platform and opportunity she will ever have had. That's how she got someone like Bill Simmons publicly branding her a "f***ing grifter." And that's her brand now. Catherine's brand is "Early childhood development proponent," and TW's brand is GRIFTING. Passing herself off as someone she is not, as knowing things she does not know, as doing things she does not do, as caring for things she does not even notice, in order to take your money and become more powerful doing it - THAT is her brand.And she's going to have a very hard time shaking it.​ post link: https://ift.tt/bDwVYAy author: Cat_Woman_238 submitted: October 25, 2023 at 05:50PM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit

[mariacallous]

This is almost too funny:

I technically have three health insurance coverages:

-The prescription drug plan through my union -A prescription for injectables/chemo drugs plan through my employer -The health insurance (with some very limited prescriptions?) through my employer

The first covers one of the prescriptions my endo listed, the second covers another one, and the third covers two other drugs (including Ozempic).

However, the second plan requires prior authorization and step therapy for that drug, and the third plan also requires prior authorization. The second and third also have limitations on amounts and so forth.

The drug covered by the second plan is the most expensive, the drug covered by the first plan is the next expensive, and with the prior authorization and coverage review, I could potentially have the Ozempic and other drug covered for $0, based on what the website/plan info is saying.