Rose Langsjoen

PhD researcher armed with sass and a deep knowledge of virology and molecular biology.

[Lauren @cabsav456]

What exactly are you referring to when you say Tulsi "exposed Fauci and the deep state"?

I've actually read the documents she declassified. If you've followed the congressional hearings, intelligence reviews, and Fauci testimony over the last several years, there is very little that's new in Tulsi's supposed "bombshell" release.

What's interesting is that many people are now using these document releases to dismiss the recent WaPo reporting about Tulsi as a "hit piece" because she supposedly exposed some massive scandal.

But what exactly did she expose?

The COVID documents basically show:

• Researchers believed all the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a lab-modified coronavirus existed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

• Because of that, a lab-related origin was being seriously considered alongside the natural spillover theory.

• U.S.-funded EcoHealth Alliance research involved collaboration with Wuhan researchers studying bat coronaviruses.

THAT'S IT.

Now, the government was definitely too quick to publicly dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis in 2020. The government also should NOT have been pressuring social media companies to suppress certain COVID-related content. That is exactly why so many people became convinced there was a massive conspiracy & that their government was lying to them.

Never again.

Importantly, though, these documents do NOT show that officials secretly knew COVID came from a lab. They do NOT show that scientists had proof of a lab leak and buried it. They do NOT show a coordinated coverup, despite the way the accompanying press release was written.

The documents show scientists & intelligence analysts debating competing hypotheses in real time while dealing with incomplete information. Pretty normal stuff, actually.

There is no smoking gun. No proof of engineering. No proof of a cover-up. No proof that COVID originated from a lab leak.

The conclusion remains exactly where it's been for years:

• A lab leak remains plausible.
• Natural spillover remains plausible.
• We still don't know.

And six years later, we may never know.

So if you think Tulsi revealed some earth-shattering new fact, tell me specifically what it was.

What new information did you learn from these documents that wasn't already public? Because I've read them, and I'm not seeing it.

[breanna 🇺🇸🇩🇪 @txgermanbre]

“Billionaires already pay more taxes than you ever will” is one of the most financially illiterate arguments on this app because it confuses nominal dollars with effective burden.

A billionaire paying $500M in taxes sounds enormous until you remember they gained $20B in asset value while doing it. The relevant metric is percentage, not raw dollars. A teacher paying 22% of a $60k salary is carrying a heavier proportional burden than someone paying 8% while their wealth compounds tax-deferred through stock appreciation.

And this “their money was already taxed” line is mostly fiction at billionaire scale.

Middle-class wealth is usually income that got taxed, then saved. Billionaire wealth is overwhelmingly unrealized appreciation. Tesla stock going vertical did not mean Elon “earned” $100B in taxable salary. The shares appreciated. Under current law, that appreciation can sit untaxed for decades, get borrowed against for liquidity, then receive stepped-up basis treatment at death that can erase the embedded gains entirely.

That is not “double taxation.” In many cases it is functionally zero taxation on the primary mechanism of wealth accumulation.

People also weirdly talk about billionaires like they emerged from the forest carrying capitalism on their backs with no public inputs involved.

Their companies rely on:
public roads
public courts
public contract enforcement
public utilities
public universities
public research grants
public internet infrastructure
public IP law
public military-protected trade routes
public education systems producing labor

The modern corporation is not built in isolation. It operates inside an enormous state-supported framework.

And no, asking whether someone should contribute proportionally to maintaining the system that enabled $100B fortunes is not “greed.” That framing is emotional theater designed to avoid discussing the actual structure of tax law.

The real debate is simple:
Should labor income be taxed continuously while massive asset appreciation can compound largely untouched for generations?

That’s the argument. Everything else is distraction.

[David Juurlink @DavidJuurlink]

Have you heard about young people dying suddenly after COVID-19 vaccination?

Our new study in @PLOSMedicine shows there's absolutely nothing to that. If anything, the opposite is true.

With @husam247 and @DrJeffKwong

https://t.co/lGw9cbNjNB

[MP Arizona☀️🏳️‍🌈💙🌵🐕🐕‍🦺🫂💦🏜🐟🌴🎙🌎🌻♍️🌊 @AzPetrich]

"What if a drug addict used your tax dollars to get SNAP benefits?"

The government uses my tax dollars to bomb villages, arm warlords, fund coups, and trafficks children through proxy states. If a "junkie" eats because of me, that's the most moral thing my taxes have done.

[Tim Hannan @TimHannan]

If you want voter ID at the polls you need to make the required ID free. Otherwise you’re charging people to vote and that’s called a poll tax. The fascists are against a free ID because it’s not about securing elections it’s about creating obstacles for poor people.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

The maximum an individual can legally donate to a candidate in an election is $3300.

Elon donated $277M to Trump in 2024 because of loopholes rich people use to buy elections.

If you care about election integrity — overturn Citizens United so our elections aren’t auctions.

[Political Punk @actingliketommy]

It's important to know why Dems voted down Nancy Mace's resolution to release congressional sexual harassment records.

Read AOC's thread.

In short, @NancyMace put a bad bill forward, knowing Dems would vote it down... so she can use that to try discrediting them on Epstein.

If you look at Nancy's entire timeline now, it's nothing but attempts to smears Dems movements on Epstein because of her shitty resolution... which had no victim protections or guardrails. Nancy offered up a poorly-written and harmful text just to get people to vote no... so she could ultimately use Dem behavior as an end around to help Trump look not-guilty.

Presumably because she is desperate for some help in the South Carolina governor's race. I can't wait until Nancy is unemployed... she's such a deceitful and nasty bitch.

[🏈 emily🌲 @emilyofeasttx]

we used to get excited about a good winter storm down here in Texas but now we all have PTSD and generators.

[Dr Terry Simpson @drterrysimpson]

This is a clever metaphor—but it collapses under facts.

Yes, The Washington Post reports declining vaccination rates.
But why they’re declining matters.

1) Trust didn’t collapse because vaccines failed.
It collapsed because:
•misinformation spread faster than measles
•social media rewarded outrage over evidence
•public figures normalized doubt about settled science

Vaccines didn’t change. The information ecosystem did.

2) “Rushed to market” is demonstrably false.
Routine childhood vaccines are among the most studied medical interventions in history, with decades of safety monitoring. Comparing them to a hypothetical, untested “trust vaccine” is rhetorical sleight of hand—not analysis.

3) Public health didn’t ignore side effects.
Adverse events are continuously tracked, published, and acted on. What was ignored were:
•bad-faith actors monetizing fear
•cherry-picked studies and ecological fallacies
•the myth that “asking questions” excuses rejecting answers

4) Trust isn’t rebuilt by validating false premises.
Trust is rebuilt by:
•telling the truth clearly
•correcting misinformation quickly
•refusing to pretend all opinions are equally supported by evidence

Appeasing false beliefs doesn’t restore trust—it entrenches them.

5) The consequences are measurable.
Where vaccination drops, measles, pertussis, and hospitalizations rise. That’s not theory. That’s observed reality.

You don’t rebuild trust by implying public health was reckless.
You rebuild it by stating plainly:

Vaccines work.
They are safer than the diseases they prevent.
And pretending otherwise is what actually broke trust.

Bottom line:
This isn’t about tone or “shaming.”
It’s about whether medicine is guided by evidence—or by metaphors designed to excuse its rejection.

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

CBS just debunked the MAGA talking points on fraud in Minnesota. CBS is now run by conservatives and even they are calling the lies out. Share this around.

[MAGA Cult Slayer @MAGACult2]

92 People have been arrested in conjunction with the fraud in Minnesota. They’ve been investigating and prosecuting since 2014. You don’t know this Maga because you live in an echo chamber.

[Andrew Mercado @AndrewMercado]

We have completely destroyed Nick Shirley's propaganda video at daycare centers in Minneapolis within a 48-hour timeframe. Incredible work. The fraud has been held accountable in Minnesota for the past 3 years, and our Governor’s administration has work to do to prevent it from happening again. It’s not a matter of national interest. It’s not a matter of national security. If you weren’t aware of the fraud in Minnesota prior to Nick’s propaganda video that’s a personal problem.

[Rose Langsjoen @RMLangsjoen]

Very good explanation of one tactic billionaires take to avoid taxes and a decent proposal for closing the exploited loophole.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

This is a no brainer.

Here’s why.

The “buy, borrow, die” strategy is the single biggest loophole in the American tax code, and Ackman just proposed the cleanest fix anyone has ever put forward.

Let me walk through the mechanics.

Step 1: You build $10B in company stock. You never sell it. No taxable event occurs because capital gains only trigger on realization.

Step 2: You need $500M to buy a yacht, fund a foundation, or just live large. Instead of selling stock and paying 23.8% federal capital gains, you walk into Goldman Sachs and borrow $500M against your shares at 5-6% interest. Under federal tax code, loan proceeds are not income. You now have $500M in liquid cash and owe zero income tax.

Step 3: You keep borrowing. Year after year. The interest payments are trivial compared to the tax savings. A 6% interest rate on $500M is $30M annually. The capital gains tax you avoided? $119M. You’re saving $89M per year by borrowing instead of selling.

Step 4: You die. Here’s where the magic happens. Your heirs inherit the stock at “stepped-up basis,” meaning the cost basis resets to current market value. That $9.9B in appreciation that was never taxed? It vanishes from the IRS’s perspective forever. Your heirs sell a small slice to pay off your outstanding loans, keep the rest, and start the cycle again.

This is generational tax avoidance at scale.

Elon Musk had 238 million Tesla shares pledged as collateral in a 2024 SEC filing. That’s one-third of his total holdings. Larry Ellison has $24 billion in Oracle stock pledged. The research firm Audit Analytics found Musk’s pledged shares alone account for more than a third of all shares pledged across the entire NYSE and Nasdaq combined.

These aren’t edge cases. This is standard operating procedure for anyone with nine or ten figures in appreciated stock.

Now here’s what Ackman proposed:

If you borrow against company stock in excess of your cost basis, treat the loan as a deemed sale for tax purposes.

Example: You bought $100M in stock. It’s now worth $1B. You borrow $600M against it. Under current law, you owe nothing. Under Ackman’s proposal, you’d owe capital gains on $500M because that’s the amount exceeding your basis.

The IRS would treat it as if you’d sold $500M worth of stock. You’d pay the 23.8% federal rate. You’d still have your shares. You’d still get future appreciation. But you couldn’t extract the economic value of gains while pretending no realization occurred.

The elegance is in what this proposal avoids.

Wealth taxes require annual valuation of every asset, including illiquid private companies, art, real estate. The compliance costs are enormous. The legal challenges are real. The constitutional questions around taxing unrealized gains haven’t been settled.

Ackman’s approach sidesteps all of that. It doesn’t tax wealth. It doesn’t tax unrealized gains sitting quietly in a brokerage account. It only triggers when you borrow against those gains. The moment you access the economic value, you pay tax as if you’d sold.

The counter-argument is that this would discourage leverage. Ackman addresses this directly: that’s a feature. Encouraging billionaires to take massive margin positions against their own companies creates systemic risk. When Tesla dropped 30% in 2022, Musk faced potential margin calls that could have forced selling into a falling market. The tax code shouldn’t subsidize that behavior.

The political math works too. Wealth taxes poll well but die in Congress and courts. This targets only the people using a specific loophole. It doesn’t touch the doctor who borrowed against her house or the small business owner with a line of credit. It’s narrow, defensible, and hard to frame as class warfare.

One shouldn’t be able to live and spend like a billionaire while paying no tax. If you’re extracting value from appreciation through borrowing, you’re realizing the economic benefit.

The tax code should recognize that.

[Jake Scott, MD @jakescottMD]

A 0.1% case fatality rate sounds small until you apply it to a virus that infected essentially every child born. Pre-vaccine, that meant 400-500 deaths per year in the U.S. and over 2 million deaths annually worldwide.

But death isn’t the only outcome that matters. In the U.S. every year, measles caused 48,000 hospitalizations, 4,000 cases of encephalitis (a quarter of whom were left permanently brain damaged or deaf), and 7,000 seizures. Then there’s immune amnesia, which leaves kids vulnerable to other infections for years, and SSPE, a fatal brain disease that can appear a decade after recovery.

“99.9% survival” isn’t the flex you think it is. The vaccine doesn’t just prevent death. It prevents hospitalization, brain damage, deafness, and years of immune vulnerability. Reducing all of that to “not the plague” is missing the point entirely.

[Jake Scott, MD @jakescottMD]

This shouldn’t be a philosophical debate. It’s a misunderstanding of how infectious disease works.

Vaccines aren’t perfect. The measles vaccine is 97% effective with two doses, not 100%, so some vaccinated people remain vulnerable. More importantly, some people can’t be vaccinated at all: infants under 12 months, immunocompromised patients, people with anaphylactic reactions to vaccine components. They depend on the rest of us not spreading a highly contagious virus to them.

Measles has an R0 of 12-18, meaning each infected person spreads it to 12-18 others in an unvaccinated population. The virus can linger in the air for two hours after an infected person leaves a room. At that level of contagion, you need 92-95% vaccine coverage to stop community transmission. When coverage drops, outbreaks happen, and the people who pay the price are often those who had no choice in the matter.

“My body, my choice” makes sense for decisions that affect only your body. Transmissible disease isn’t that. Your choice not to vaccinate can put a 6-month-old in the hospital or kill an immunocompromised kid who couldn’t get the shot.

The question isn’t “why does it matter if I take it.” The question is whether your comfort with risk should override someone else’s right not to get infected by you.

[CBS Mornings @CBSMornings]

Nine Republican Montana state senators voted with 18 Democrats to form a new majority to pass major legislation last session, undermining the influence of the ultra-conservative caucus of the state’s GOP.

Dubbed “The Nasty Nine,” the Republican senators were censured by their own party, stripped of their GOP status and cut off from voting rights at their party’s conventions in June.

Some of those senators — and two of the Democrats they voted with — spoke with @jolingkent about what they accomplished: “We voted for lower income tax relief. We invested in infrastructure. We invested in the future of Montana.”

[Andrew Mercado @AndrewMercado]

The fraud cases in Minnesota are real. But they are not new, and they were not newly uncovered by right wing influencers.

Federal prosecutors and the FBI began investigating large scale fraud tied to Minnesota state and federally funded programs years before the 2024 election. The largest case, Feeding Our Future, was publicly charged in September 2022, when the Department of Justice announced indictments alleging tens of millions of dollars in pandemic child nutrition funds were stolen. Since then, more than 50 defendants have pleaded guilty, with prosecutions continuing through 2023, 2024, and into 2025.

By 2023, those investigations had already expanded beyond Feeding Our Future into Medicaid services, autism therapy providers, housing assistance, and childcare programs. Minnesota’s Legislative Auditor, federal investigators, and local outlets like the Minnesota Reformer, FOX 9, KSTP and others were reporting on systemic failures and active criminal probes well before the 2024 presidential campaign was underway.

During the 2024 campaign, national media and political influencers increasingly reframed these cases around Governor Tim Walz. Outlets like CNN aired segments highlighting the fraud during an election year, often without clearly stating that the investigations, indictments, and guilty pleas all began long before Walz became a national political target and long before viral videos entered the picture. That framing also fueled targeted harassment of Minnesota’s Somali community, with entire neighborhoods, workers, and families painted as suspect despite the fact that fraud cases are individual criminal matters, not collective guilt.

That context matters when influencers like @nickshirleyy present themselves as exposing something hidden. His video does not start a new investigation or reveal information unknown to law enforcement. It repackages an ongoing federal case that had already been charged, prosecuted, and widely reported, and presents it as a fresh discovery. Showing up with a camera at childcare centers, inserting himself into an active investigation, and driving harassment toward a specific community reflects a serious lack of journalistic ethics and basic moral responsibility.

Fraud should be prosecuted and people who stole public money should go to prison. But accountability also requires honesty about timelines, sources, and impact. Turning an active criminal investigation involving childcare into viral content during an election year while ignoring years of prior reporting, and while entire communities face harassment as a result, is not journalism. It’s agitation propaganda.

[Rose Langsjoen @RMLangsjoen]

@JoeCassandra "Message is for those who have been fed crap that 'life is better w/o kids'" etc etc

When the message literally says, "Some harsh truths for those who choose not to have kids: ..."

I AM friends with parents, but definitely not the ones like you!

[Rose Langsjoen @RMLangsjoen]

@drdanchoi We the taxpayers literally paid for your residency and fellowship training. How about you return your FAAOS and go back to practicing general medicine?

[Rose Langsjoen @RMLangsjoen]

@briannalyman2 1, healthcare is in fact a right, and no one is forcing you to become a doctor if you feel otherwise. No one is demanding you to go to medical school. Brings me to 2, resident training is funded through GME, which is funded by.........Medicare AND Medicaid! Hope that helps.