Peter C Cook MD, MPH

Interested in Healthcare Policy

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Let me tell you about the most extraordinary act of patient agency I've ever encountered.
In 2024, a tech founder named Sid Sijbrandij was told by his oncologists that they had nothing left. His osteosarcoma — an aggressive bone cancer in his spine — had returned after surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy so brutal he needed four blood transfusions to survive it. He'd exhausted every standard treatment. He wouldn't qualify for clinical trials. The implicit message: good luck.
Most people accept that verdict. Sijbrandij — co-founder of GitLab, a company worth $6.4 billion built on the principle that information should be open and transparent — decided to treat his cancer the way he'd built his company.
He went founder mode.
He quit his day job. Assembled a dream team. Hired a geneticist named Jacob Stern, formerly of 10x Genomics. And then he did something no cancer patient has ever done at this scale.
He generated 25 terabytes of his own medical data.
Whole genome sequencing. Whole exome sequencing. Bulk RNA-seq. Single-cell RNA-seq across multiple timepoints. Full-body PET/CT scans. Organoid models grown from his own tumor tissue. Immunohistochemistry. Spatial transcriptomics. Every diagnostic modality that exists — run on his specific cancer, at his specific stage, from his specific body.
Then Jacob Stern fed it all to ChatGPT

[Kevin Deutsch @kdeutschjourno]

The Dems are moving closer to officially opposing Israel’s existence; in other words, tacitly supporting the genocide of seven million Jews in Israel and destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

From Jewish Insider:

“Several House Democrats, including in leadership and top progressives, remain divided or notably noncommittal over whether Israel’s right to exist in safety and security should continue to be a policy position of the Democratic Party moving forward.

The official 2024 Democratic Party Platform, released by the DNC for former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, stated that party leaders “believe a strong, secure, and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States” and that the party’s “commitment to Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its right to defend itself … is ironclad.”

However, the Democratic Party has continued to face internal division over how to exercise that support, or to what extent that support should continue to exist at all.

When asked on Tuesday whether support for Israel’s right to exist in safety and security should continue to be an official policy position of the Democrat Party moving forward, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) was noncommittal and avoided the question.”

https://t.co/H8mJg5L3Ni

[Reverend Jordan Wells @WellsJorda89710]

🚨 BOOM. Former Chief of Staff to Sen. John Hickenlooper (D) just went off-script:

“The Democratic Party is becoming unrecognizable. While Democrats are falling in love with socialism, the rest of the country is NOT.”
The insiders are finally admitting it.
#DemExit #SocialismFails #WakeUpAmerica #TwoTieredSystem #AmericaFirst

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Palestinians are the only people in history who have strangled an 8-month-old baby to death simply because he was Jewish, yet are still seen in the world as the victims.

Has the world gone absolutely mad?

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Hamas committed the crime of kinocide during the October 7 attacks. They forced men at gunpoint to have sex with their sisters and daughters, something we really haven’t seen in the world since Rwanda.

And yet in our Western media outlets and on our Western campuses, we Jews became the aggressors and oppressors.

1,200 Jews were butchered and burned alive, mutilated and beheaded in their homes, in their kitchens, at their dance parties for peace. They raped dozens and dozens of Israeli women and girls. They took 251 people hostage, stolen from their homes, and kept them in dark, dank holes, deep underground.

And yet at the United Nations—which was created in many ways to ensure that never again would anything like this happen to the Jewish people or to any people in the world—we Jews became the violators of human rights.

It's preposterous.

Where does it come from—this moral inversion, this moral distortion of everything we have always believed in, everything we have ever cared about?

How do we fix it?

And that is really the question I started trying to answer, the question that led me on this journey of giving speeches all over the country, in almost all 50 states over the last three years, at hundreds of schools, colleges, law schools, and churches of every denomination.

Along the way, I have had thousands of conversations with people about Israel, many of whom see the world very differently than I do.

And what I came to realize is each of these people who is chanting about Israel, they've come to believe one or more of these six main claims about Israel. The good news is, each of the six claims is totally false.

The other good news is that all of these claims are, at their core, legal claims. We do not have to shout at each other about politics. The problem with politics is that two people just shout at each other and they're never going to find common ground, because they're looking at different things that they're interested in and that they care about, and they're playing by different rules. They’re not playing on the same field.

In the law, there's only one set of rules. It applies to everybody, whether you're black, brown, or white, whether you're a man or a woman, whether you're Jewish, Muslim, or Christian. Everybody has to comply with the law.

So I thought, why not apply the same legal methodology that we have been applying for hundreds of years in courtrooms all across this country—a methodology that we know and trust because we use it where truth-telling matters most?

That is the methodology I apply to each of these six claims in the book.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

The NYT published an entire piece on the global response to Venezuela’s devastating earthquake.

They named every country that sent rescue teams, even those that have only pledged assistance.

Yet Israel, which already has over a dozen rescue workers on the ground, was left out.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Douglas Murray: "Not one hostage I spoke with found any Gazan Palestinian who showed even the slightest human kindness. It was all celebration."

Not one Gazan saved the hostages.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

Governor Josh Shapiro’s house was burnt down.

Congressional candidate Scott Weiner was harassed until he left a Pride March.

Representative Jared Moskowitz received hateful voicemails threatening to kill all Jews.

Representative Dan Goldman was banned from a coffee shop and his office was vandalized.

Harassing and attacking Jewish lawmakers is an attempt to push Jews out of public life.

That is not criticism of Israel. It is the end of a free society.

[Uri Kurlianchik @VerminusM]

Something worth considering.

[KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat]

🚨 BREAKING: A @FreeBeacon investigation reveals Rep. Ro Khanna—who rails against the ultra-rich who "hoard wealth"—lives in a $6M D.C. mansion with a four-story elevator while his family's $340M+ fortune sits in the exact trusts, hedge funds, and LLCs he condemns.

Those trusts made 4,100+ stock trades worth ~$53M in 2025—even as Khanna leads the push to BAN members of Congress from trading stocks—while he claims "zero knowledge" of the trades.

His kids (under 10) hold stakes in three private golf clubs, a $65B wealth firm, and a distressed-debt hedge fund—the same vehicles he attacks—while his wife drives a $190K Range Rover.

Bottom line: Khanna's fortune is built and shielded exactly the way he says the rich shouldn't do it.

https://t.co/zFjDVlKSSZ

[Aviva Klompas @AvivaKlompas]

Former hostage Rom Braslavski reacted to the news that the IDF eliminated one of his captors, Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist Talal Abd al-Aal.

Rom: "This is the man who, while I was bound with ropes from head to toe and on the verge of death, forced me to open my mouth so he could spit into it. This is the man who, by his own hands and on his own orders, tortured me and nearly killed me several times. Enjoy hell, you piece of garbage."

[Ryan Saavedra @RyanSaavedra]

RFK Jr. completely debunks the whole "genocide in Gaza" lie and highlights the real genocide that is happening against Christians and Jews:

"And if you look at the Middle East, there is an ongoing genocide against Jews and Christians in all the nations in the Middle East.

In 1948, there was a million Jews in the Middle East, in the Arab countries. Today there's about 15,000 left. 20% of the population is was Christian, now it's 5%.

In Israel, in contrast, there were 150,000 Palestinians in 1948. Today there's almost 2 million. They're 20% of the population.

If Israel wanted to commit a genocide against Palestinians, it could do it in a minute. It's doing the opposite. The Palestinian population is growing enormously around Israel. There are no Jews in Jordan. There are no Jews in Gaza. The number of Christians in Gaza has dropped by about 80% over the past 10 years.

If you want to see where a real genocide is happening, it's not in Israel. It's happening in all the nations around it."

["Doc" Hypnosis 🧠 | BowTied Brain-Hacking @BowTiedTrance]

Scott Adams: "You can get 70% of people to change their mind just instantly if you say, 'This is what your team thinks.'"

Or, as I quoted @michaelmalice in "Demonetize Your Mind!":

"The average human doesn't run a true/false filter but an us/them filter."

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

WNBA player Sophie Cunningham calls out WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert by name, rips the league for not protecting her teammate, Caitlin Clark.

"This type of sh*t happens every single game to her, and the league and the refs do absolutely nothing about it."

Cunningham and co-host West Wilson also discussed the possibility that Engelbert is jealous of Clark, which may be why Clark was snubbed from the WNBA 30th Anniversary Poster.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Imagine your family worked for a generation to save enough money to buy a brownstone occupied with rent stabilized tenants on the Upper West Side. The family financed the purchase with a mortgage from a bank based on the premise that rents and cash flow would at least keep pace with inflation so you could pay interest and principal on the mortgage and hopefully have some cash flow left as a return on your investment.

While you had rent stabilized tenants, you were led to believe that the NYC Rent Guidelines Board would be required to adjudicate rental increases each year by taking a measure of the inflation of costs to own and operate a building and setting rental increases appropriately.

You believed the RGB would do its job as the board is comprised of two representatives each for landlords and tenants and five independent representatives that represent the general public.

Now, a new mayor @NYCMayor Mamdani is elected on the promise of freezing rents. There are about two million rent stabilized renters that benefit if rents are frozen so by promising frozen rents the new candidate for mayor buys votes and wins the election.

The new mayor achieves his objective by stacking the RGB with directors who do not follow their obligations and simply vote for a rent freeze as a preordained conclusion as evidenced by the statements of an RGB director who resigned in protest for this very reason.

Meanwhile, inflation in NYC is rampant in utilities, real estate taxes, insurance, repairs and maintenance, etc. and now your rents are frozen. Real estate is a high operating leverage business which means that frozen rents and inflating expenses will cause property cash flows to plummet and your after debt service cash flow to go negative.

I expect therefore there will be hundreds if not thousands of small NYC property owners who are now or will shortly be underwater on their mortgages, and without any cash flow to maintain their assets.

If you remember the images of the South Bronx burning in the mid 1970s, you can viscerally understand what is happening to small NYC real estate owners.

While the rent freeze appears to be short-term good news (long term it will lead to poorly maintained apartments) for 2 million NYC renters, it is bad news for the 2 million or more renters in the 1 million market rate apartments in the City because a landlord-hostile market is not likely to add meaningfully more supply and market rents will likely continue to escalate at a high rate.

All of this seems quite unfair and wrong unless I missing something?

Why am I wrong?

For disclosure: I do not own any NYC rental apartments.

[JayTakes @SportsWithJay0]

Colin Cowherd goes OFF on the WNBA’s Caitlin Clark snub:

“They dropped a commemorative poster for 30 years of the WNBA. Caitlin Clark isn’t on it… but Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese are.

When she entered the league, they had to move her road games to bigger arenas just to fit her fans. She upgraded the WNBA from Southwest back rows to private jets.

Yet she’s left off the 30-year anniversary poster?

It’s either incompetence or intentional. Both are embarrassing.”

[Frum TikTok @FrumTikTok]

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik thanking President Trump for his incredible support for the Jewish community.

[China Now @ChinaNow24]

Chinese shoes that let you walk on water!

Designers in China have created special footwear that allows users to move across the surface of calm lakes and ponds. This remarkable innovation blends fun, recreation, and a unique sporting experience.

[RedWave Press @RedWavePress]

TRUTH NUKE: Bill Maher on Democratic Socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier: “There’s one candidate she will be a congresswoman from New York’s 13th District, who the New York Times asked her if someone mu*ders someone randomly should they go to jail? Couldn’t get her to say yes to that.”

“She says, no more police EVER, AT ALL ever. She says our veterans are war criminals. She said f*ck Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s a r*pist.”

“So there is a WOKE MIND VIRUS and I think we found patient zero.”