Jim O'Gara

Musician/Mathematician, AuDHD, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Survivor, Muscular Therapist, Irish-Puerto Rican w/ Jewish wife & kids. Multi-Cultural is how I roll. U.U.

[Jim O'Gara @Jim_OGara]

What small thing are you doing today to make the world a better place?

I’m donating platelets .

[Jim O'Gara @Jim_OGara]

@potatocel2 @awkwardgoogle I don’t know…maybe if 7 out of every ten men weren’t absolute cunts they actually might get laid.

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

In the past decade, four Republican-leaning states - Florida, Missouri, Arizona and Nebraska - all approved large increases to their state minimum wage through voter ballot initiatives. What happened next?

The economic data is clear: in all four states, employment levels stayed steady, specifically in the restaurant and retail sectors, which were most affected. But workers' wages grew significantly.

This is exactly consistent with Virginia's experience in raising their state minimum wage as well.

Over and over, real-world experience is showing us that higher minimum wages directly benefit low-wage workers without any measurable cost to employment levels.

Full report: https://t.co/PPgHItq69n

[Jim O'Gara @Jim_OGara]

Every day I think to myself, “Is he dead yet?

No?!

Fuuuuuuuuuuuccccccck! (Said in Roy Kent’s voice)”

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

YES. YES. I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS. I started a spreadsheet in 2019 tracking every category where America is number one globally and people keep asking me to stop bringing it to Thanksgiving.

We lead the PLANET in medical debt. Not the developed world. The PLANET. There are countries where "medical bankruptcy" doesn't translate because the CONCEPT doesn't exist in their language. We invented it. We EXPORTED it as a field of academic study. German researchers fly here to observe it happening in real time. They take NOTES. We are a living laboratory and the experiment is "what if you made people choose between insulin and rent." We chose. Exposed. This is the thing we're best at.

We lead in incarceration. More humans in cages than China. China has 1.4 billion people and an authoritarian government and we STILL have more prisoners. We beat AUTHORITARIANS at their own game using FREEDOM. We did it with both parties cooperating across NINE administrations. Name ONE other bipartisan project that lasted fifty years. You can't. This is our moon landing. We just don't film it.

We lead in insulin pricing. $300 for a vial that costs $30 in Canada. Canada is VISIBLE FROM DETROIT. You can see Canada from a Walgreens parking lot where someone is deciding between half-doses. The same molecule. The same manufacturer. The border adds $270 of LEADERSHIP. That's what leading looks like. It looks like a 900% markup on not dying.

We lead in mass shootings. Not per capita. Not adjusted. RAW TOTAL. We have so many that researchers had to invent subcategories. School. Workplace. Concert. Grocery store. We have a TAXONOMY. Other countries have incidents. We have a CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM with peer-reviewed SORTING CRITERIA. That's infrastructure. That's RIGOR.

We lead in healthcare spending AND in maternal mortality among rich nations. Simultaneously. We spend $4.3 trillion a year and mothers die at rates that would concern a developing nation. We spent MORE money to get WORSE outcomes so consistently that it can't be incompetence. Incompetence wouldn't be this RELIABLE. This takes PLANNING. This is an ACHIEVEMENT of systems working exactly as designed across multiple industries cooperating to extract value from the specific biological event of someone trying not to die.

We lead in per-capita spending on our military while our veterans sleep in tents. We allocated $886 billion to defense and our soldiers come home to a VA waitlist so long that some of them die on it. We spent the money. We just didn't spend it on THEM. The money went somewhere. It led the way. Just not toward the people who fought.

I printed this tweet on a 24x36 poster. It's in my living room. My wife moved out last month but she didn't take the poster so I think she agrees.

[Jim O'Gara @Jim_OGara]

@michelleyroo2 May his memory alway be for a blessing!

[Patrick Heizer @PatrickHeizer]

Every Democrat since Carter has decreased the federal deficit.

Every Republican since Eisenhower has increased the federal deficit.

[Jim O'Gara @Jim_OGara]

I learned a new word this morning. I like it!

noun: obscurantism

-the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known.

Ex: "Her obscurantism and willful misdirection keep her child in the dark about what truly happened.”

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You want to understand the last eighty years of American politics in one sentence?

The owning class won the class war, convinced the losing side it wasn't happening, and then watched the losing side fight each other over the scraps.

Immigration. Crime. Culture war. Race. Gender. Guns.

Every single one of these is a real issue with real stakes for real people.

And every single one of them is dramatically more consuming of working-class political energy than the question of who owns the thing you made with your labor, and why you have to negotiate for a fraction of its value, and why the person who made nothing from it extracts more than the person who made everything.

That question, the only question that structurally threatens the arrangement, is the one that is never on the ballot.

It's not on the ballot because the people who write the ballot understood Vietnam.

They understood what happens when the right question gets asked loudly enough.

So they made sure you're always asking a different one.

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

This here is probably the single most important thing for anyone to understand about North Carolina's state government.

Our state legislature - the North Carolina General Assembly - writes every single law, every budget, nearly every regulation, and makes the overwhelming majority of personnel appointments in our state.

Taxes? The state legislature.
Water discharge regulations? The state legislature.
Voter registration? The state legislature.
School standards? The state legislature.
Road construction? The state legislature.
Drawing election districts? The state legislature.

Other state agencies may carry out and perform the statutes and rules the state legislature sets down, but it's always the state legislature that calls the tune. After all, they write the laws - not the Governor, not the Attorney General, not the courts.

Republicans have held complete and unbroken majority (often supermajority) control of the North Carolina state legislature for the last 15 years straight, because they gerrymandered the election maps to ensure they'll never lose.

How are they doing?

[Jim O'Gara @Jim_OGara]

@newstart_2024 "no gene for ADHD has been found" because MULTIPLE genes/

"ADHD is a highly heritable (74–90%)...driven by polygenic risk, with recent studies identifying specific rare variants in MAP1A, ANO8, and ANK2 genes & common variants across 12 genomic loci."

https://t.co/IFzoVa3gCd

[Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran]

No.

They did not find that it can cause heart damage.

They found out WHY people with specific underlying cases of undiagnosed heart injuries and therefore increased cardiac troponin outside the heart, could rarely develop myocarditis post vaccine.

The vaccine did not cause the myocarditis.

An undiagnosed heart injury did.

That underlying condition would have caused a more severe case of myocarditis had those individuals had COVID without having had the vaccine.

A heart injury that is severe enough to have increased cardiac troponin outside of the heart means you ignored a medical emergency because at somepoint there was significant damage to the lining of your heart - that is NOT something you wouldn’t have felt.

So ignoring a health problem and not getting it properly diagnosed, led to exposure.

Had you been diagnosed with an existing heart injury you would not have received the vaccine.

Being anti-science, anti-doctor, or the high cost of medical care is what leads to most people not getting properly diagnosed.

And in this case it led to increased cardiac troponin outside the heart rather than just inside the heart, and so the immune system over reacted to the vaccine causing an inflammatory condition around the heart.

So one again anti-vaxxers are wrong, and being anti-science is what led to issues, but are cherry-picking headlines they don’t understand.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Smarter ADHD sufferers tend to get diagnosed with ADHD at later ages.

Consistent with the idea that smarter people are able to compensate for ADHD-related deficits, being smart seems to be 'protective' for noticing that a person has the condition.