I think this article by Betsy McKay in the Wall Street Journal about the new class of drugs including Wegovy and Mounjaro is confused. Here’s the meat of it:

The success of the powerful new class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs shows how important chemistry is to determining a person’s weight. The brain is the body’s chief chemist, regulating appetite and making it difficult for many people to shed pounds and keep them off. The brain determines how much fat it wants people to carry, according to years of research bolstered by the new drugs.

The amount is like a setting on a dial, or what many researchers call a “set point” or “defended fat mass.” The brain maintains the dial setting or set point by regulating how much a person eats. Ozempic, its sister drug Wegovy and another, Mounjaro, lower the dial setting, or set point, in effect by acting on the brain to reduce hunger and make a person feel full sooner, some obesity researchers say.

The new set point lasts as long as a patient is on the drug, they say. Patients who ate a lot before they started taking one of the drugs feel less hungry and fill up more quickly—sometimes after one slice of pizza when they once ate the whole pie.

“This is not about willpower or personal choice,” said Dr. Florencia Halperin, an endocrinologist and chief medical officer of Form, a virtual medical weight-loss clinic. “This is about your brain driving behaviors.”

to which I respond so what? It’s easier for you to maintain a healthy weight than it is for me because your brain doesn’t send your body the wrong signals. That does not render it healthier for me to be overweight. It just means that it’s harder for me than it is for you. Life isn’t fair.

Furthermore, these drugs have all sorts of side effects possibly including pancreatitis, allergic reactions, kidney, stomach, and gallbladder problems, even some forms of cancer.

And there’s a distinction between serious obesity and losing five or ten pounds every so often. We have no idea what on again off again usage of these drugs will do on a longitudinal basis.

Taking drugs so you can avoid self-restraint is the very definition of gluttony. Gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins for a reason. That reason is that it reflects a relationship with material things that is disregulated, out of control.

Virtue is a habit. You cultivate the virtue of self-restraint by practicing it. If you don’t practice it, you won’t magically restrain yourself.

The reason I don’t post about Trump is simple. I don’t intend to vote for him. I’m content to let the cases work their way through the courts. I don’t want him to “live rent-free in my head”, to quote an advice columnist.

Well, here’s a title I never expected to see in The New Republic: “15 Reasons Why Trump Should Be Favored Against Biden in 2024”. That’s the title of a piece by Brynn Tannehill there.

That’s a bit misleading. Here are his first several bullet points:

1. Americans perceive the economy as bad.
2. Trump probably won’t be in prison at the time of the election because these trials take so long, and he faces the possibility of being out on appeal even if he does go to trial.
3. Nothing says you cannot run for president from prison.

Those don’t illustrate why Donald Trump should be favored over Biden so much as that it’s not impossible for him to win.

Unlike progressives I think I understand why Donald Trump has such a following. It’s not fascism, racism, or any other -ism other than, possibly, elitism on the part of the progressives. He’s tapped into a broad discontent with the imperious and condescending air being assumed by the denizens of Washington, DC. Call it the “Deep State” or whatever else you care to but it’s real and it’s dangerous.

The problem I see is that Trump will not or cannot deliver on dismantling it. As evidence I would submit the four years of his presidency.

My problem is that I don’t want either Trump or Biden to be elected president. I think they’re both low characters and corrupt. You can’t get blood from a stone. Or as the New Testament puts it a bad tree can’t bear good fruit.

I’ve been seeing quite a few articles lately whinging about remote work. I have news for the writers: those office buildings will remain empty. Some claim lower productivity which is disputed. I would be more impressed with the articles if I were sure that the authors weren’t sitting at home writing them. One that I read recently described how much more efficient people moving boxes were when they came back to the office. People moving boxes aren’t working from home. I found the simile puzzling.

To understand why people won’t be returning to their offices any time soon, this article at Forbes by Morgan Smith makes a pretty good primer:

Remote jobs aren’t disappearing — they’re just moving out of expensive coastal metros like New York and San Francisco.

Faced with labor shortages and rising wages, companies are hiring for more remote jobs overseas and in smaller U.S. cities.

During the pandemic, thanks to jobs that were no longer tied to offices, millions of Americans flocked to cities like Phoenix, Asheville and Boise, seeking greener pastures and more affordable housing.

But remote work has opened up new opportunities for employers, too. Companies quickly discovered that their employees could still be productive from afar, often for a third of the cost, if they stretched their location requirements.

Some of the claims by people writing in praise of officework are, shall we say, exaggerated:

Currently, 12.7% of full-time employees work from home, illustrating the rapid normalization of remote work environments. Simultaneously, a significant 28.2% of employees have adapted to a hybrid work model. This model combines both home and in-office working, offering flexibility and maintaining a level of physical presence at the workplace.

An eighth of full-time employees is not an enormous number and IMO is unlikely to fill those empty offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. For one thing a lot of those employees are really remote. On a daily basis I have meetings with workers in India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Serbia, and Mexico. I doubt they’ll be coming into the office soon.

My heart goes out to the people of Lahaina who’ve lost their homes, all of their possessions, and, in many cases, family members to the fires that have swept through their town. We won’t know for a while how great the fatalities were. It will turn out to be something between 1% and 10% of the town’s population. Claire Rush, Beatrice Dupuy and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher report at the Associated Press:

LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui town climbed to 93, authorities warned that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. The blaze is already the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said Saturday.

“We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles, and it is full of our loved ones,” he said, noting that the number of dead is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.”

The scale of the destruction and damage is substantial:

At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, nearly all of them residential. Across the island, damage was estimated at close to $6 billion.

To give you some idea the total permanent population of Lahaina is something around 12,000 people, nearly all of them employed in the hospitality sector: groundskeepers and cleaning workers, cooks, waiters and waitresses, etc. Not exactly high-income people.

The article goes on to strike a parallel between the Lahaina fire and the Paradise fire in northern California a couple of years ago. I think the parallel is too many people living in a environment that can’t really support such a population, low housing construction standards and weak regulations, and emergency infrastructure inadequate to the task.

At this point none of our friends or acquaintances who have cadaver dogs have been called into service although I wouldn’t be surprised if some were.

Clearly, such a poor population cannot be expected to bear the costs of this tragedy but I don’t think having the costs fall on poor people on the mainland is just, either. That’s what happens when the federal government spends more than it receives in revenue and borrows the rest. The burden of that falls mainly on the poor.

This disaster was no surprise. They have been warned of it for more than a decade, as reported by Dan Frosch and Jim Carlton at the Wall Street Journal:

Nearly a decade before a wildfire destroyed the coastal Maui town of Lahaina this week, killing at least 89 people, a report by Hawaiian fire researchers warned that the area was at extremely high risk of burning.

Another report, in 2020, tied fires to winds from a passing hurricane—similar to the ones that fanned the Lahaina blaze.

And the state’s electric utility had for years worried about wildfire risk in the area. It even flew drones to monitor conditions.

Yet local authorities said in the aftermath of this week’s devastation that though they knew wildfires were becoming more frequent in Hawaii, they weren’t prepared for one to roar through Lahaina.

IMO it’s pretty clear that the tourism and hospitality sectors need to bear more of the risk of such catastrophes. There are 378 hotels in Lahaina. Poor mainlanders shouldn’t be subsidizing them.

I think the award for Rant of the Day should go to Jacob Howland at UnHerd:

The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.

That’s just a snippet. It goes on in a similar vein at some length. If anything I’d say he’s understating the problems.

I for one do not believe that we get the government we deserve. I think we get the government inflicted on us by people trying to gain wealth and power.

I’m starting to see demands that each employee have his or her individual office (with a door) as a means for luring them back into the office. That will not happen for all sorts of reasons. It requires too much space. It’s too expensive. It does not facilitate collaboration and communication but rather encourages isolation.

For the last 60 years American businesses have been oscillating between bullpens and cubicles. Here’s a bullpen:

and here are cubicles:

The transition from bullpens to cubicles began in Germany in the 1960s, an attempt at giving people more pleasant, practical workspaces.

Companies like Google (Alpha), Twitter (X) and Facebook (Meta) have been transitioning back to bullpens.

When I worked for a German company in the early 1970s there was only one private office in the entire company, that of the CEO. Other top managers staked out conference rooms as their “offices”. It was comical. And tragic. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the CFO rooting through a big cardboard box for the right ledger.

Here’s a generous snippet of Andrea R. Flores’s op-ed about changing our asylum system in the New York Times:

U.S. asylum laws were designed to protect people fleeing harm. They were enacted in the decades following the Holocaust to ensure that the United States never again turned away people fleeing persecution. But now, many blame these laws for the chaos and inhumanity at the nation’s southern border.

The biggest blow to America’s commitment to asylum came during the pandemic, when former President Donald Trump invoked Title 42, an emergency measure that allowed border agents to turn away asylum seekers, under the justification of preventing the spread of the virus.

When Title 42 restrictions were lifted in May, President Biden enacted a carrot-and-stick approach aimed at deterring new asylum seekers from traveling by foot to the border. These new measures included a set of legal pathways, including a parole program that allows people from select countries, including Cuba and Haiti, to legally enter the country for at least two years, provided they have a financial sponsor in the United States. Doing so has discouraged would-be migrants from taking a dangerous trek with a smuggler, often through multiple continents.

This approach would have been a great step forward if it hadn’t been paired with a countermeasure that prohibits some asylum-seekers at the border from applying for protection in the United States. The vast majority of migrants must secure appointments at an official port of entry, which are difficult to obtain, or else they will be subject to expedited removal if they cannot prove that they sought legal protection in another country along the way.

On July 25, a federal court ruled that the president’s asylum ban was illegal. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit put the ruling on hold for 14 days to allow the administration to appeal.

The nation’s asylum system was not designed to meet the needs of all immigrants forced to flee their homes. But the global challenges we’re facing require a reimagining of the country’s immigration framework. Until Congress finds the political will to act, the president should use his authority to relieve pressure on our asylum system and give migrants the ability to legally work once they reach the United States.

Here’s my question. Unless you assume that no one ever lies, how does that differ from an open border? Basically, I can think of no surer way to guarantee that we adopt restrictions on immigration and asylum tighter than those imposed in the 1920s and changed in the 1960s than Ms. Flores’s proposal.

There’s quite a bit of fulmination about Justice Thomas’s “luxury vacations” today, spurred, I guess, by this piece by Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica:

During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

I agree that’s outrageous. I just want to point out two things.

1. That doesn’t prove that the other justices aren’t getting the same or similar treatment. Indeed, the article observes:
   

   Stephen Breyer accepted a flight to a Nantucket wedding from a Democratic megadonor. Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a tour of Israel and Jordan paid for by an Israeli billionaire. Those gifts are public because Breyer and Ginsburg disclosed them.

2. As I’ve said before I think there should be a 100% tax on all such gifts for all public officials extending during their entire terms of office and possibly longer, say, for as much as five years.

What is does prove is that the folks at ProPublica are especially interested in Justice Thomas’s behavior. That might be explained because among sitting SCOTUS justices Justice Thomas is the most likely to rule in a way considered ideological. He’s not the only one. That roster includes Justice Alito, and Justice Sotomayor. Justice Jackson doesn’t have a track record yet but that she will join their ranks is a reasonable assumption based on performance to date.

Journalism ain’t what it used to be. Once upon a time not that very long ago, a scoop was a scoop wherever the chips might fall. It’s not that way anymore.