Professional Impregnator
No, Project 2025 Isn't About Nick Cannon's Balls
It’s hard to say that everybody is talking about something these days because we live in politically segregated echo-chambers, but it does feel like a lot of people took note of Project 2025 this week. It’s certainly all over my echo-chamber whose, liberal members were alternatively weeping, raging, and popping Xanax after last week’s Supreme Court decision paved the way for a despot. While Fox News watchers may not know about it, viewers of the BET Awards were told to pay attention to it by host Taraji P. Henson, and Google searches for the term spiked big time.
For those who haven’t heard yet, Project 2025 is a 920-page Christian Nationalist manifesto created by a coalition of conservative groups including the Heritage Foundation. It’s meant as a blueprint for how the next Republican president (which they assume will be Donald Trump) could obliterate the separation of church and state, consolidate power in the executive branch, and implement a bat s**t crazy far-right agenda.
It calls for purging hundreds of civil servants and replacing them with ones who will follow the principles it espouses. The intro, written by former Trump Advisor Paul Dans suggests the plan is a call to action for ordinary conservatives:
Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.
If that doesn’t send chills down your spine for its use of the word army alone, this quote from Heritage Foundation President, Kevin P. Roberts, who wrote the opening essay, will:
We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
That certainly sounds like a threat of violence from the side that owns more of the guns. Trust me, people in my echo chamber took an extra Xanax when we read that one.
There are lots of legal scholars and political pundits scrutinizing the document, how it came to be, and what it will mean for our government and our way of life. I don’t feel qualified to offer a full picture analysis (besides, I’m too busy popping Xanax). However, given its Christian Nationalist roots, it should surprise no one that the plan decimates sexual and reproductive freedom. And that’s what Wednesdays are all about.
Project 2025 calls for eliminating phrases such as “sexual orientation," “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “gender equality,” “abortion,” and “reproductive rights” from all federal laws and regulations. It would rename the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Life, which would be comical, if it weren’t scary. (Of course, the Department of Life would cut Head Start which feeds and educates low-income kids every day, so I’m guessing it should be really be renamed the Department of the Unborn. The far right seems to stop caring right after birth.)
The plan would also ban mifepristone and take emergency contraception off of the ACA’s “no co-pay” list. (This sounds so tame that I’m sure it’s just a first step to ridding the country of emergency contraception, if not all contraception.) It would also make it harder to get gender affirming care even as an adult and urge Congress to define gender as male or female and fixed at birth.
It paints porn and sex education with one brush and aims to get rid of both. Andra Watkins, who writes the Substack How Project 2025 Will Ruin Your Life, notes that the document says this on page 5:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Throwing adult performers in jail and shutting down Verizon because people are whacking off to Pornhub on their cell phones is absurd enough. But Watkins reminds us that Christian Nationalists have a much broader definition of porn than the rest of us. Remember the controversy over David’s tiny dick? They’d jail Michelangelo if they could. And now they want to brand librarians and sex educators as sex offenders in an effort to ensure the next generation is entirely uninformed. (Fascism thrives on ignorance.)
I’m glad Project 2025 is in the spotlight this week, and I think we should all do what we can to keep it there. If anything good came out of Dobbs, it’s the confirmation that taking away rights really riles up voters. Most voters are not Christian Nationalists. They might not understand why making it easier to fire government employees is dangerous and may even agree with what the document says about immigration, for example. Still, I’m pretty sure that I most voters (even a lot of Trump votes) want to be able to whack off to Pornhub on their cell phones without government interference.
But that’s the thing about fascist governments, they don’t really care what voters want.
Of course, we’re not there yet, we still have an election that could prevent this from happening (or at least force it to rebrand as Project 2029). That’s why Trump has spent the week trying to distance himself from the document. It’s written by a host of people who used to work for him, and his name appears all over it, but he swears he knows nothing about it. (He also says some of it is awful, which would be hard to know if one has never heard of it.)
I’m sure he hasn’t read it. He’s the boy who comes to class without having done his homework, and 920 pages is about 919 too many for his dementia-addled brain. But it’s still all about him because the people who wrote it see in him an eagerness to be a despot that no other mainstream political candidate has ever demonstrated. We can be sure that if he wins, the people around him will execute this playbook religiously (pun entirely intended).
Election results in the United Kingdom and France have me a little bit heartened as voters seemed poised to reject far right factions. Yes, their systems and issues are different than ours, but the UK elected Boris Johnson right around the time we elected Donald Trump, and they were basically the same disgusting person.
Hopefully, the attention on Project 2025 makes it inside other echo chambers and alarms enough people before election day.
New PrEP Drug Found 100% Effective
A drug already used to treat HIV showed remarkable efficacy as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in a Phase III trial with women and adolescent girls in Africa. The results were so good (no infection in the treatment group) that the independent Data Monitoring Committee recommended researchers stop the blinded phase of the trial and offer the injection to all participants.
PrEP is a prevention strategy that involves using a prescription medicine to reduce the risk of new HIV infection. The CDC recommends PrEP for those at high risk of getting HIV. PrEP has been found to be 99% effective in preventing sexually transmitted HIV when used correctly. It is a little less effective (about 74%) at preventing HIV in people who use injection drugs.
There are currently three medications approved for use as PrEP in the United States. Truvada and Descovy are pills that need to be taken daily. (The two brands are made by different manufacturers but contain similar active ingredients.) There is also a shot given every two months called Apretude which uses a different active ingredient. Truvada and Apretude are approved for men and for people who have receptive vaginal sex (cisgender women or transgender men). Descovy, however, has not been approved in the US for those having vaginal sex.
The current study, which is part of the Purpose Study, was designed to determine if a different HIV drug, lenacapavir, could also be used as PrEP when given as an injection just twice a year.
This first arm of the Purpose study enrolled 5,338 women in South Africa and Uganda. All of the women in the study received some version of PrEP. Given that PrEP already exists, and existing methods already work very well, it would be beyond unethical to have a control group that just got a placebo. Instead, some participants got the lenacapavir shots, some took Descovy pills, and some took Truvada. To keep the blind part of the study blind, those women who got shots took daily placebo pills, and those who took pills got twice yearly placebo shots.
There were no HIV infections among people getting lenacapavir, 16 infections among those taking Truvada, and 39 infections among those taking Descovy.
Researchers also compared the results to what they call the background HIV incidence by matching participants with local women with similar attributes. The background HIV incidence was 2.4 infections per 100 women per year or 2.4% compared to 0% for lenacapavir, 1.7% for Truvada, and 2.0% for Descovy.
It’s not a vaccine, but getting a shot twice a year isn’t that different for people in countries like the US than keeping up with flu shots and Covid boosters. It’s even more important in low resource countries like South Africa and Uganda where many people don’t have regular access to medical care. Experts say it could be particularly groundbreaking for women in these areas who could face stigma or even violence if partners knew they were using PrEP.
Another study needs to be done to confirm these results before Gilead, the manufacturer, can go to the FDA for approval. There are also four other arms of the Purpose study investigating lenacapavir in different populations around the world. We will get more results soon.
In the meantime, advocates in the US are worried about the price. As a treatment for people living with HIV, lenacapavir costs $42,500 per year. While Gilead says it is willing to share its intellectual property with generic drug manufacturers in lower-income markets (for a fee, off course) sooner rather than later, this could take a long time, and won’t help bring down the cost of the drug in the US.
And therein lies the paradox that is big pharma. On the one hand, preventing HIV with two shots each year is a scientific advance that people merely dreamed of at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. On the other hand, the profit motive seems insatiable.
Nick Cannon’s Balls Insured for $10 Million Dollars
Loyal readers know that I’ve been a bit obsessed with Nick Cannon and his desire to keep a sizeable portion of LA’s model-actress-whatever population knocked up at any given time. The man has a dozen children with six different women and fathered eight children in 2021 alone. Now, his balls are back in the news. Don’t get too excited, there’s no birth announcement or baby mama #7. Yet. This time it’s about the normally boring topic of insurance policies.
In a July 1st interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cannon explained why he’d recently had his his testicles insured for $10 million dollars:
I had to insure my most valuable assets. Because you hear about like all these different celebrities insuring their legs... so I was like, 'Hey, well, I got to insure my most valuable body part.’
He’s not wrong, celebrities frequently take out insurance policies on their money-generating body parts. Mariah Carey (who is baby mama #1, by the way) has insured both her vocal cords and her legs for a reported $70 million dollars. The Boss has his vocal cords insured for $6 million. (Really, Mariah Carey’s voice is worth more than then Bruce Springsteen’s?) David Beckham’s leg was insured for almost $200 million. An unnamed client had Heidi Klum’s legs insured for $2.2 million. The supermodel told Ellen DeGeneres that a small scar on her left leg from a childhood accident meant that it was worth 200k less than the right. Aquafresh paid to have America Ferrara’s smile insured for $10 million. And Holly Madison, formerly Mrs. Hugh Hefner, had her breasts insured for $1 million.
As bizarre as this sounds to those of us who only insure our homes and cars, I suppose there’s some logic to it. It’s like disability insurance. If Beckham’s leg was severely damaged during his playing days, he and his sponsors would have lost a lot of money. If America breaks a tooth and her smile is drastically altered, Aquafresh could lose money on ads it had already made.
Nick Cannon, however, isn’t a professional impregnator. He may be the male equivalent of a model-actor-whatever, but none of his jobs (Wikipedia lists him as an American comedian, television host, actor, and rapper) would be threatened by a swift kick in the balls.
As with most things Nick Cannon, this was just a publicity stunt. A June 7th press release (my humblest apologies for not picking up the story sooner) explains this as a promotional partnership between Nick and Dr. Squatch, a personal care company that had just launched a line of Ball Care products. At the time Cannon said in a statement:
Haters say it’s time for me to stop having kids and put this super sperm to rest, but I’m doubling down on these valuable balls and my future kids. Shoutout to Dr. Squatch for giving my balls the credit they deserve and hooking me up with the protection I need to keep this family tree rolling!
I guess we have to give Cannon credit for being in on the joke. He poked (pun intended) fun of himself in a New Year’s Eve themed condom commercial in which he pretended not to know how to open the wrapper. For Father’s Day 2023, he made a cocktail called the vasectomy with Ryan Reynolds who owns Aviation Gin. And now he’s inuring his balls.
We also have to suspect that as a father of 12, some of whom may still be in diapers and others almost in college, Nick will take easy advertising bucks wherever he can get them.