Ken Florida

Midwesterner

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day – the Allied landings in Normandy, which significantly hastened the countdown to the Nazis' collapse in World War II. It is one of the most important moments of unity among the defenders of life in human history, and it was less than a year until the peoples’ aspiration for freedom and the hope of peace prevailed in May 1945. It happened then. We are working to make it happen again today.

And although yesterday in Petersburg another cynical order to continue killing was issued for the army trying to destroy our freedom, history has seen this before. The Nazis also had their own hopes after D-Day. But freedom still wins. And even in the darkest circumstances, people find ways to come together to protect life.

I thank all those who are now helping to protect the values that prevailed in World War II. I thank everyone who is defending life. Glory to Ukraine!

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

@Mylovanov The power structure is all about a single individual, for life, with no institutions to guide transition. Russia would be in the same shape.

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

@historyinmemes First job in 1979 paid 4$ an hour. 4 $ from 1979 is worth 18.35 now. That's probably a low estimate. I think minimum wage was 3.35 an hour.

[Chidanand Tripathi @thetripathi58]

A guy sat at his laptop ready to permanently delete his 15-year-old Gmail account.

He was getting 400 spam emails a day. Fake Best Buy receipts. Phishing links from "Netflix." Cryptic extortion threats.

He hovered his mouse over "Delete Account" and sighed: "I just want peace."

His coworker, a former email deliverability engineer, looked over his shoulder.

"Before you nuke 15 years of contacts and data, let me show you something. Your email isn't broken. It's weaponized. There are 22 ways you've been leaving the door wide open. Google won't tell you this because the data collection feeds their entire ad engine. Give me 14 minutes."

Here's what she showed him:

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

@engineers_feed Rubies and Sapphires are transparent aluminum oxide. Literally you can make synthetic ruby, and sapphire with a hydrogen flame and aluminum oxide powder.

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

@keith_dorschner @WallStreetMav Used to be a thing called the "Brain Drain" where the best and brightest came to America, and joined our team. Superstars from every country in the world. Good days .... Instead of collecting random jackasses.

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

@Houseofyogi Cut your own nose off, to spite your face?

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

@newstem61 @vision_ia Zero rent, zero water bill, zero energy expenditures. He's already won.

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

This is fascinating, the fixed wing drone loiters or rather stalking the roads, looking for Russian logistics. Notice the civilians are completely unafraid of it? They have confidence in it's discrimination, unlike the war criminals, human Safari Russians.

[Roy🇨🇦 @GrandpaRoy2]

A Ukrainian “Hornet” mid-range strike UAV patrols the highway from Mariupol to Melitopol on the land bridge to Crimea.
It is looking for trucks and especially fuel tankers.

[Handre @Handre]

Milton Friedman's greatest regret.

The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.

Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.

Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.

This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.

Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

[Dalton (Analyze & Optimize) @Outdoctrination]

Vitamin C can powerfully reduce fatigue, even improving energy levels within hours in studies.

This first study looked at people exhausted from work, and initiated 6 grams of vitamin C daily, for 2 weeks, as therapy.

They also measured other biomarkers to see if vitamin C improved anything else.

The results were amazing.

Vitamin C had a potent anti-fatigue effect.

They used two different measures of subjective fatigue, improving by >30% in one and ~15% in the other.

Meanwhile, related biomarkers improved across the board:

➞ HbA1c (insulin sensitivity)
➞ Cortisol (often high in people with chronic fatigue)
➞ Liver enzymes (ALT, AST, r-GTP, measures of liver damage)
➞ CRP (inflammation, known player in fatigue)

Another study in 2012 showed even more striking benefits.

They used a single 10g IV dose of vitamin C, again in office workers who were just exhausted from work.

They measured how fatigue varied shortly after.

Literally within hours, people on the vitamin C had notable reductions in fatigue.

People on placebo noticed nothing.

This effect persisted til the next day - their energy level remained higher.

One more study here from 2022, this time in healthy young adults.

They were more focused on mental fatigue here and measured their performance in response to a multitude of cognitive assessments.

People taking 500 mg 2x a day of vitamin C showed:

➥ Less fatigue
➥ Improved attention
➥ Better "absorption" (memory of study content)

in comparison to placebo.
People taking the vitamin C showed better reaction times on a cognitive assessment.

So vitamin C's anti-fatigue properties showed both objective and subjective improvements.

Vitamin C is actually concentrated in the brain, more so than almost any other tissue.

There, it has a number of different roles, especially as it pertains to fatigue.

1. Antioxidant / anti-inflammatory roles - vitamin C helps recycle vitamin E and acts as an independent free radical scavenger. These properties mean it reduces damage to neurons and microglial activation, two key drivers behind fatigue.

2. Neuromodulation - vitamin C plays a quasi neurotransmitter role, mainly by upregulating the glutamate transporter, which lowers synaptic glutamate levels. This means reduced excitotoxicity in the brain, less mitochondrial overload and thus better mental performance.

3. Vitamin C also is a required cofactor in both the synthesis of norepinephrine, a critical neurotransmitter for wakefulness, and it is needed for the synthesis of dopamine.

4. Blood flow - one key factor in fatigue is reduced blood flow to the brain. Vitamin C is known to have protective effects for the vascular system, sparing nitric oxide content and preserving the collagen of the vessels, meaning better blood flow to the brain.

[Barbara Oneill @BarbaraOneillAU]

12 HERBS YOUR BODY NEEDS AND NO ONE WOULD TELL YOU:

1. Milk thistle can regenerate up to 70% of damaged liver cells in just weeks.

2. Dandelion root makes your liver release 2x more bile, flushing toxins faster.

3. Cilantro binds to heavy metals like mercury and lead and drags them out naturally.

4. Burdock root purifies your blood and clears skin from deep within.

5. Nettle leaf cleanses over 10 liters of blood daily with its chlorophyll power.

6. Triphala removes gut toxins by up to 50%, boosting digestion and detox.

7. Turmeric raises glutathione levels, neutralizing up to 90% of free radicals.

8. Ginger speeds up lymphatic detox flow by 30–40% naturally.

9. Parsley flushes out excess uric acid and sodium, cleansing your kidneys.

10. Holy basil (Tulsi) enhances detox enzymes by up to 60% while calming stress.

11. Chlorella binds 8x its weight in heavy metals, detoxing cells deeply.

12. Garlic activates enzymes that eliminate over 20 harmful toxins from your body.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A man in the United States who carries a rare genetic mutation that virtually guarantees early-onset Alzheimer’s has remained symptom-free into his late 70s, defying what scientists once considered an inevitable fate.

Doug Whitney inherited a highly aggressive variant of the Presenilin 2 gene. In his family, the mutation has been devastating, ten of his mother’s thirteen siblings developed Alzheimer’s and died before age 60. Yet Whitney, now in his late seventies, continues to live with sharp cognition and no clinical symptoms of the disease.

According to a study published in Nature Medicine, he is one of only three known people worldwide with this mutation who have shown exceptional resilience. Researchers believe the key may lie in his decades-long career as a shipboard mechanic, where he worked for years in extremely hot naval engine rooms.

Analysis revealed exceptionally high levels of heat shock proteins in Whitney’s cerebrospinal fluid — protective molecules produced by the body in response to heat stress that help repair and refold damaged proteins. Although brain scans show significant amyloid plaque buildup, he has remarkably few tau tangles, the protein structures most strongly linked to cognitive decline.

This extraordinary case strengthens emerging evidence that controlled heat exposure or heat therapy may trigger beneficial cellular responses capable of protecting the brain against neurodegenerative diseases.

[Arboleda-Velasquez JF, et al. (including Doug Whitney as study participant). "Exceptional resilience to Alzheimer’s disease in a carrier of the PSEN2 mutation." Nature Medicine, 2025]

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

@Simstersnose @jamie68851282 @BGatesIsaPyscho All cause mortality went up.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

If science were never to be questioned, your doctor would still be recommending a particular brand of cigarette to settle the nerves.

You'd be dosing the baby with heroin cough syrup, because Bayer sold it over the counter.

You'd be rubbing cocaine on its gums for teething, and the chemist would recommend the stronger tube.

The DDT lorry would still come round to fog the street while the children carried on playing in the spray.

Your surgeon would be reaching for the icepick, because the man who pioneered the lobotomy was given a Nobel Prize for it.

Pregnant women would be handed thalidomide for their morning sickness, with a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

You'd be drinking radium tonic for your energy and brushing with radioactive toothpaste for the glow.

Stomach ulcers would still be filed under "stress," and the man who proved they were bacterial would still be a laughing stock.

Butter would be the villain and margarine the heart-healthy hero, on the firmest medical advice going.

Lead would still be in your petrol, your paint and your water pipes, certified harmless by the people selling it.

All of it, in its day, was the consensus. Settled. Beyond polite debate.

"Settled science" is the phrase people reach for when they would quite like you to stop asking questions.

[Chief_Engineer @ChiefEngineerCE]

A Letter from a Boomer to Gen Z

I read your letter. I hear your anger. You feel betrayed, and a lot of you have every right to feel that way.
You’re right that it got bad. But let me tell you how it actually happened from our side.

We switched parties more than once trying to get smaller government. We voted for politicians who promised to cut spending, secure the border, and put Americans first. We showed up at the polls. We wrote letters. We trusted the system.

The politicians did what they wanted anyway.
We never voted for open borders. We never voted to ship our factories overseas. We never voted to raid the Social Security lockbox or take the country off the gold standard. Those decisions were made by the generation before us and the permanent ruling class in Washington. They broke the deal no matter which party we sent to power.

We built the interstate system, the power grid, the early internet backbone, the satellite networks, and much of the physical world you live in today. You enjoy the benefits of that infrastructure every single day. We handed it to you in far better shape than we received it.

The suffering you feel, the wage stagnation, the housing crisis, the debt, the broken trust, didn’t fully hit until your generation and the one after. We watched it coming, warned about it, and got called every name in the book for doing so.

We didn’t create this mess. We inherited part of it and then failed to stop it. That’s on us. But pretending we wanted this outcome or voted for it is simply not true.
We still believe in hard work, self-reliance, and building something real. We hope you do too.

The country we grew up in had real problems, but it also had real opportunity. You deserve that same chance.

A Boomer who still shows up and votes every single time

[Vitamin King @KingOfVitamins]

Cancer cells have figured out how to hide from vitamin D.

They do it by silencing the receptor that lets vitamin D regulate their behavior.

That’s not an accident. That’s a survival mechanism.

Here’s what the research says about vitamin D and cancer prevention: 🧵

[Ken Florida @KenFlorida3]

@GrandpaRoy2 The missiles might be missing some essential components that are foreign and difficult to aquire?

[Dr. Eric Berg DC @dr_ericberg]

Lifestyle is just as important as nutrition.

Prioritize:
• Stress management
• Resistance training
• Quality sleep
• Avoiding smoking and excessive alcohol
• Limiting refined sugars and ultra-processed foods

[Pradeep Pandey @Div_pradeep]

Google installed a 4GB AI model on your computer without asking.

No warning. No permission screen. No uninstall button you can find.

27 million Chrome users woke up with Gemini Nano on their devices and didn't know it.

Here's how to check if you're one of them and what to do about it: 🧵