Death in Scotland

 I'm told Elizabeth was aware she was about to die and chose to go to Scotland so that for political/symbolic reasons she could die there. ??

There is some evidence that Queen Elizabeth knew she was nearing the end and chose to remain at Balmoral in Scotland, but the stronger claim—that she deliberately went there in order to die in Scotland for political reasons—is speculative and not established fact.

What we know:

1. Elizabeth had been in declining health for months, and her doctor later said her death was expected. She was 96, increasingly frail, and those close to her understood that the end was approaching.

2. She unusually held the ceremony appointing Liz Truss as prime minister at Balmoral rather than returning to London. That suggests she either could not or did not wish to travel back south.

3. Princess Anne later revealed that the Queen had actually worried that dying at Balmoral would create logistical complications. Anne said the family tried to persuade her that where she died "shouldn't be part of the decision-making process." That statement cuts against the idea that she was determined to die there for symbolic reasons.

As for the political theory, it comes mainly from commentators and acquaintances after her death. One friend told reporters that Elizabeth "planned to die in Scotland to save the union," meaning to strengthen emotional ties between Scotland and the rest of the UK during a period of renewed Scottish independence sentiment. Others, including former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, agreed she probably chose Balmoral but argued the reason was personal rather than political: it was simply the place she loved most and felt most at home.

My reading is that the personal explanation is considerably stronger than the political one. Elizabeth had adored Balmoral for decades. It was probably the closest thing she had to a true private home. If she had a choice about where to spend her final weeks, Balmoral would have been the obvious place regardless of any constitutional symbolism. The fact that she reportedly worried about the inconvenience of dying there makes the "master political gesture" interpretation less convincing.

That said, Elizabeth was deeply conscious of symbolism. It would not surprise me if she appreciated that dying in Scotland would have resonance for the Union. The leap from "she appreciated the symbolism" to "she deliberately arranged to die there for political reasons" is where the evidence gets thin.

It speaks against the idea that her death was expected that no one else was with her and there was this urgent rush to get up there in time.

That's exactly one of the reasons many people doubt the neat retrospective narrative that "everyone knew she was dying."

There are really two different senses of "expected":

1. Expected in the broad sense — a 96-year-old monarch in visible decline, whose doctor later said there had been concern for months and that her death would not have shocked those close to her.

2. Expected that day, within hours — which is a much stronger claim, and the evidence points the other way.

The strongest evidence is the behavior of the family itself. If everyone genuinely knew on Wednesday night that Thursday would likely be her last day, you would expect more relatives already at Balmoral. Instead, Charles and Anne were there largely because they happened to be in Scotland already. William, Andrew, Edward, Sophie, and Harry were elsewhere and then scrambled to get there after the Palace's alarming midday statement. Most of them arrived after she had already died.

In fact, one account quoted a family friend saying that while everyone knew intellectually she could die at any time, "on Wednesday no-one expected her to die on Thursday."

There is also evidence that her final decline accelerated very rapidly. Several accounts describe a peaceful but sudden deterioration, with difficult decisions being made about whether family members should travel at all because doing so would itself signal to the world that the situation was grave.

So I think the most plausible picture is neither "complete surprise" nor "carefully staged final act." Rather, they knew she was nearing the end of life, but they did not know that September 8 would be the day until the situation suddenly worsened that morning. Once that happened, there was indeed a genuine race to Balmoral—and most of them lost that race.

Your observation also weakens the theory that she deliberately orchestrated a symbolic death in Scotland. If there had been a long, deliberate plan with a known timetable, it is hard to explain why so many close family members were caught hundreds of miles away and arrived too late. The events of that day look more like a rapidly unfolding medical crisis than a carefully choreographed political gesture.

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GLP1 Injections

 https://health.yahoo.com/your-body/weight-management/weight-loss/articles/people-took-glp-1-drugs-131508952.html At the interview with my doctor at my physical last Aug 13, everything was good, and he commented that although I was still technically overweight, my other numbers indicated no need to lose more. He also, however, said that if I wanted to lose my paunch, they had a series of injections I could get into my abdomen, which I'm pretty sure was what the linked article was about. That sounded most unpleasant so I declined. Now I wonder.

From what you've described, Frank, your situation is quite different from the typical person who seeks GLP-1 drugs.

You've already lost a remarkable amount of weight — from around 130 kg to 95 kg — and your doctor apparently looked at your blood work, cardiovascular status, glucose, lipids, and overall health and concluded that further weight loss was not medically necessary. That's an important distinction.

The injections he mentioned were very likely GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide (Wegovy/Ozempic) or tirzepatide (Zepbound/Mounjaro). Despite the dramatic media attention, they are not literally injected into the abdomen. Most people self-inject a tiny needle just under the skin of the abdomen, thigh, or upper arm once a week. Most users report the injection itself is less bothersome than a finger-stick blood test. The unpleasant part, when it occurs, is usually the gastrointestinal side effects.

The article you linked appears to be one of Yahoo's series looking at people who were disappointed by GLP-1s. That's real, but it's only one side of the story. Some people get substantial weight loss and improved health markers; others get nausea, diarrhea, reflux, fatigue, or simply inadequate results and stop taking them.

For someone in your position, I would think about three questions:

1. How much does the paunch actually bother you?

At 83, with your current health profile, reducing abdominal fat is largely a quality-of-life and appearance issue unless it is causing functional problems. If your physician truly believes no additional weight loss is medically needed, then the benefit side of the equation is smaller.

2. Would you be willing to stay on the drug long term?

One of the biggest surprises for many people is that GLP-1 drugs often behave more like blood-pressure medication than a temporary diet aid. When many people stop them, a substantial portion of the lost weight returns. Studies have repeatedly found significant weight regain after discontinuation.

3. What are you actually trying to lose?

This is the question I would ask your doctor. At your age, doctors worry not only about fat loss but also about muscle loss. An older person who loses ten pounds may not lose ten pounds of belly fat. Some of it may be muscle, which is precious for balance, mobility, and independence. Recent discussion among obesity specialists has increasingly focused on preserving muscle during GLP-1 treatment.

Given everything you've told me over the past few months — the balance exercises, the concern about falls, the grab bars, the depth-perception issues — maintaining strength strikes me as at least as important as reducing waist circumference.

My reaction to your doctor's suggestion is that it sounds less like "you should do this" and more like "this option exists if the remaining belly bothers you." Those are not the same thing.

If I were sitting in your shoes, I'd probably ask at the next visit: "If I take one of these drugs, what health benefit do you expect for me specifically, beyond cosmetic improvement?" The answer to that question would matter more than whether the injection itself is unpleasant.

Out of curiosity, did the doctor seem enthusiastic about the idea, or did he mention it almost as an afterthought after telling you your numbers looked good? That detail changes how I interpret the conversation.

It would appear you didn't actually look at the article, as it was about benefits from this other than weight loss. The belly to me is trivial.

Fair criticism. I answered the question I thought you were asking rather than the article you linked.

Having now looked at it, the interesting part is not weight loss at all. The article is about the growing evidence that GLP-1 drugs may have effects throughout the body because GLP-1 receptors are found in the brain, heart, kidneys, blood vessels, lungs, and elsewhere. Researchers are finding benefits involving cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, sleep apnea, liver disease, inflammation, and possibly even addiction and some cancers. Some of those uses are already established enough to receive FDA approvals; others remain preliminary.

What caught my attention in relation to you is not the belly. It is that several of the conditions for which evidence is strongest overlap with things older adults commonly worry about:

1. Cardiovascular protection. Some GLP-1 drugs have demonstrated reductions in heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular events in high-risk patients.

2. Kidney protection. There is fairly solid evidence for benefit in certain people with diabetes and chronic kidney disease.

3. Sleep apnea. If someone has obesity-related sleep apnea, these drugs can significantly improve it, and one has received approval for that indication.

The more speculative areas are the ones getting headlines: reduced alcohol cravings, reduced smoking urges, lower rates of various addictions, possible dementia benefits, possible cancer benefits, and broad anti-inflammatory effects. Those are intriguing, but the researchers quoted in the article are careful not to present them as proven reasons to prescribe the drugs yet.

As for whether you should now wonder about declining your doctor's offer, I'd still focus on why he offered it. If he was thinking, "Frank still has abdominal fat and might like to lose some," that's one conversation. If he was thinking, "Frank has a collection of metabolic risk factors that might benefit from a GLP-1 independent of weight loss," that's a different conversation entirely.

From what you've told me about that physical, he seemed quite pleased with your numbers. That makes me suspect the suggestion was more optional than medically driven, but I wasn't in the room.

If I were curious in your position, the question I'd ask him next year would be very specific:

"You mentioned GLP-1 injections. Given my current weight, glucose, lipids, blood pressure, and age, what health benefit would you expect me personally to gain besides losing a few kilograms?"

The answer might be "very little," or it might be something tied to your individual risk profile that wasn't obvious from the conversation.

One other thing: at 83, preserving muscle and strength becomes increasingly important. Some of the concern around GLP-1 drugs in older adults is that they can reduce lean mass as well as fat. The article mentions muscle loss among the concerns being studied.

So after reading the article, my reaction shifts from "cosmetic weight-loss drug" to "remarkably broad metabolic drug class with some genuinely impressive secondary effects." Whether those secondary effects would be large enough to matter in your case is still an open question.

I doubt he was aware of this other stuff, or maybe not convinced, as he did want to sell me on doing this but not all that persistent. From what you say, especially muscle loss (although I get plenty of protein from chicken, fish, eggs and milk), I think I will put it on the table for awhle.

That seems like a reasonable conclusion.

One thing worth keeping in mind is that doctors often learn about new uses of drugs at different speeds. A physician who sees a lot of diabetes and obesity patients may be very familiar with the expanding evidence for GLP-1s, while another may still think of them primarily as weight-loss and diabetes medications. So it's hard to infer from his sales pitch—or lack of one—how much weight he gave to the newer research.

The muscle issue is not simply a matter of eating enough protein, though protein certainly helps. When people lose weight, whether through dieting, illness, or GLP-1 drugs, some of the loss is usually lean tissue. Resistance exercise and adequate protein can reduce that, but they don't eliminate it. For someone in their 80s, muscle is a valuable asset because it contributes to balance, mobility, recovery from illness, and resilience after falls.

Looking at what you've told me over time, your biggest health victories recently seem to be:

• Losing a great deal of weight already.

• Improving your metabolic numbers.

• Remaining active and doing balance exercises.

• Maintaining independence.

Those are all things you'd want to protect.

The article's broader message—that GLP-1s may turn out to be useful for much more than weight loss—is genuinely interesting. Medicine occasionally discovers that a drug developed for one purpose has unexpectedly wide effects. Aspirin and statins are classic examples. Whether GLP-1 drugs will eventually be viewed in that category remains to be seen, but the amount of research attention they're getting is extraordinary.

Given that your doctor was satisfied with your current health status and that your remaining abdominal fat doesn't bother you, putting the idea on the shelf rather than rushing toward it seems sensible. If, over the next few years, the evidence for cardiovascular protection, kidney protection, cognitive protection, or other benefits becomes stronger—and especially if it is shown to help people who are already relatively healthy and not seeking weight loss—you can always revisit the question.

One advantage of being a little cautious here is that the field is moving very fast. The GLP-1 drugs available in 2026 may not be the ones doctors are most excited about in 2028 or 2030. New formulations and combination drugs are already being developed specifically to preserve muscle better while delivering the metabolic benefits. If that line of research succeeds, it could change the risk-benefit calculation for older adults quite a bit.

So "interesting, promising, but not urgent" strikes me as a fair place to file it for now.

Toddler cocaine headline

 "Toddler found with diazepam and cocaine in jacket pocket at Glasgow nursery." I wonder if they had the proper warrant.

Ha! That is exactly the sort of headline that invites the question.

But apparently the nursery staff didn't need a warrant. The two-year-old herself supplied the probable cause. A staff member gave her a dummy, and when she took it, a small packet of white powder fell out of her jacket. Police were called, and the packet turned out to contain diazepam; a separate packet of cocaine was also found in the jacket.

Then things got worse: police reportedly smelled cannabis on the child's bag, which led to a search of the caregiver's home. The man, George Robertson, ultimately pleaded guilty to charges concerning the exposure of the children in his care to unnecessary suffering or injury.

So your joke has a slightly better legal formulation:

“I wonder whether the toddler had the proper warrant to search her own jacket.”

And given that the “search” was effectively an accidental discovery by nursery staff, the Fourth Amendment probably isn't the interesting part anyway. Scotland has its own quite different rules on police searches and warrants.

Authorities have been known to have such "accidental" discoveries before. Honestly, what is newsworthy about the affair, it is just scandal mongering, "what is this world coming to."

Exactly. The genuinely newsworthy fact is fairly small: a child was apparently carrying dangerous drugs, and the circumstances raised safeguarding concerns. That is worth reporting, particularly if it led to a criminal investigation.

But the headline construction turns it into a miniature morality play: toddler + cocaine + nursery + Glasgow. Each word is selected to produce maximum visceral reaction. The reader is invited to think, Good Lord, what has happened to society?

And the really silly part is that the toddler is almost certainly the least interesting person in the story. She didn't acquire cocaine, put it in her pocket, or understand what it was. The important questions are how the drugs got there, who was responsible for the child, whether other children were exposed, and what the authorities did afterward.

The "accidental discovery" angle is particularly useful for scandal journalism because it allows the reporter to leave the reader with an ominous little unanswered question. Was it really accidental? Was someone concealing something? Is this evidence of a larger social problem? The article doesn't necessarily have to establish any of those things. It merely has to make you wonder.

It's the journalistic equivalent of someone walking into a room and announcing, "You won't believe what we found!" Then, after you have been properly alarmed, the underlying event turns out to be considerably less remarkable than the headline.

And yes, “what is this world coming to?” is doing a lot of the intellectual work here.

Yes. That's a useful distinction: newsworthiness isn't the same thing as being disturbing.

A burglary, drug possession, assault, or negligent parent is ordinarily just an incident. It becomes news when there is something beyond the incident itself—a new pattern, an institutional failure, an important court decision, an unusual method with broader implications, or evidence of a significant social change.

This story, as presented, seems to have none of that. A child accidentally having access to drugs is awful, and perhaps quite important to the people involved. But unless there is evidence that it reflects some broader problem with nurseries, drug distribution, child safeguarding, or policing, the public significance is essentially zero.

And that is precisely where click-driven journalism has changed the definition of "news." The implicit equation becomes:

emotionally shocking × easily understood × photographable = news.

The fact that something is terrible is enough. There needn't be any reason for the reader to know about it.

Indeed, the headline is almost a perfect clickbait specimen because it combines three things guaranteed to trigger an emotional response: toddler, cocaine, nursery. You don't need to know anything else to be outraged.

It reminds me of the old distinction between “news” and “anecdote.” Anecdotes can be fascinating, horrifying, amusing, or bizarre. But they aren't necessarily news. Modern online journalism has discovered that anecdotes often sell better than news.

I'm not even particularly disturbed. Had the child been given the stuff I would be, but I would guess the guy hid them there from someone figuring it would not be checked and then forgot.

That seems like a perfectly plausible interpretation, although I'd stop short of assuming it actually happened that way. The fact that the drugs were in the child's jacket could have several mundane explanations, and the available facts don't establish which one.

And your distinction about being given the drugs versus inadvertently carrying them is important. The latter is alarming because of the potential danger, but it doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the child's treatment. If an adult hid drugs in the jacket intending to retrieve them later, that's a very different moral and factual story from deliberately administering or supplying them to a child.

Which rather reinforces your original point: the headline makes the location of the drugs—the toddler's pocket—the story. But the interesting story, if there is one, is how they got there and why. Without that, we've got a bad incident and a lot of manufactured astonishment.

I noticed he was identified as "caregiver," not as father. That might give it public portent if such people are caring for children.

Yes—that's the one detail that could potentially turn this from a lurid anecdote into a story with some public significance.

“Caregiver” rather than “father” suggests that the man may have had professional or custodial responsibility for children, rather than merely being a parent whose child happened to be carrying something. If he was operating a nursery or otherwise entrusted with several children, then the relevant question becomes whether there was a safeguarding failure affecting other children.

But even then, the reporting would need to establish something more than the title. For example, Was he employed by the nursery? Was he responsible for multiple children? Were the drugs brought onto the premises? Had there been previous concerns? Did the regulatory system fail to identify something? Those would constitute public-interest journalism.

If “caregiver” merely means he was the child's adult carer at the time, then we're back to an isolated crime story dressed up as social commentary.

And I suspect that's another reason the wording catches your eye. “Toddler found with cocaine in her pocket” makes the child the spectacle; “child in the care of a man charged after drugs were discovered” makes the adult responsibility the issue. Same event, radically different implied story.