SPHdeORD

Mild mannered physician working at a quaint metropolitan hospital. Gastroenterologist. Pronouns: Barada / Nikto

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@notaproviderMD I know. That’s what is said. So I figured I could use MgO in renal failure if not well absorbed. Well, tried it and follow up Mg levels went up fast, so can’t use it in renal failure cuz it clearly is absorbed. And I do see it work for resolving aFib.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@notaproviderMD you ok?

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@Ackattackack I love the idea of Gaudi Brutalism. To me the most impressive is the money they wasted. Putting in $850M for a 200,000 sq ft facility is wonderful!. It should have been $85M. That means 850-85=765M was not available to support Democrat election campaigns.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@spyguy8080 @DNIGabbard I appreciate your frustration. However China got nailed by COVID. If it were released intentionally they would have sent it overseas first. The COVID release strikes me as a lab leak.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@SamuelYarmagyan @DNIGabbard You can’t sue a government official for stupidity.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@ClaireFosterPHD @DNIGabbard Only after having supported research the led directly to creating this virus. I don’t call that a win.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@notaproviderMD Your absence was notable. Your clear voice was missed. My prayers for a resolution.

A-Fib is usually responsive to magnesium. American diets are generally low magnesium. I push MgO 250 mg po bid WITH MEALS (important). I’ve reversed acute a-fib with 1g of MgO po with food.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@FloreFlos Charming!

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

When I was a kid, the Bronx was burning. My dad was a fireman who happened to be an Ivy League graduate.

He told me it wasn’t the crackheads torching the city, whatever the news said. It was fraud.

Let me explain how it worked…. John Doe buys a rundown apartment building for $100k. He pockets the redevelopment tax break, then sells it to Joe Doe for $250k. Joe pockets the tax break, then sells it to Jerry Doe for $500k. Rinse and repeat until the building is worth $5 million.

The tax breaks are real. The money is not.

Because the buyers are all family, the cash flows out of Swiss bank account 27852 and right back into 27852 after every sale. There’s a transaction cost, sure, but the tax breaks more than cover it.

Then comes the payoff: they insure the building for $5 million and burn it down.

The name for this was “Jewish Lightning.” The phrase stuck around not because the landlords were all Jewish, but because the stereotype hit a nerve in a city run by Jewish mayors from 1974 to 1989, the peak of the burning. Fair or not, the term stuck.

So why was none of this investigated? NGO funding, of course.

The NYPD union was powerful, and NYC detectives had sweeping investigative authority over almost everything. Except arson. Arson belonged to FDNY detectives. NGOs, routing money through union donations, stoked the rivalry between cops and firemen.

Long story short, arson investigators got no funding and zero cooperation from the NYPD.

No money for investigations means no arrests.

Eventually the Bronx ran out of buildings to burn, and Giuliani drove the final nail into arson fraud’s coffin.

But the lesson survived, and it’s the foundation of today’s fraud. The lesson was this: the actual value of the asset doesn’t matter.

👉What matters is the movement of money.

Destruction is still very profitable. When the Baltimore bridge collapsed, the cleanup and rebuild were estimated at $1.7 billion, with the bridge reopening in 2028. The cost has since ballooned to $5.2 billion, and the wreckage still isn’t fully cleared.

Money pours into demolition,, engineering, environmental review, project management, waste removal.

But if the work doesn’t actually get done, the real expenses stay low. The money moves; the bridge doesn’t.

And here’s the leap: you don’t have to destroy anything at all. You just have to not build it.

Democrats allocate money to a government body, which hands it to a project manager, who hires consultants, who hire subcontractors, who hire more subcontractors, who funnel it back to Democrats, who allocate more money.

The fewer the actual costs (labor, materials, equipment) the more of the flow you can capture.

And if a taxpayer complains, you hire a PR firm and a few consultants to explain why costs keep exploding while nothing gets built. The easiest thing to blame is red tape.

So why does red tape exist?

Because destroying valuable property, while profitable, is too obviously unethical.

Burning buildings gets you arrested, eventually. Not building gets you a ribbon-cutting and a press release.

Here’s the deeper trap. Because our most valuable assets are fixed (houses, cars, index funds) we think of money as static. You have what you have. It grows over time, but it doesn’t flow.

That’s exactly where the fraud lives: in the flow.

The light bulb moment was realizing you don’t need to destroy physical property. You only need to destroy productivity.

If labor and materials are never purchased while money pours in, the fraud works.

You don’t have to build or destroy anything of value, just productivity. You just announce a project and start writing checks while throwing up enough red tape to block any real spending on labor and materials.

This is basically why Congress handed @PeteButtigieg $1.2 trillion and our roads and bridges still suck five years later. They put up signs, traffic cones, and red tape, and little else.

But there are a few residual problems. 1/2

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

Just reposting this. Funny take on Waymo.

[Frank Brown @FrankBr05713205]

The 1986 Buick Riviera was the first production car to feature a built-in touchscreen, known as the Graphic Control Center (GCC). The system used a green, monochromatic cathode-ray tube display to control climate, radio, and vehicle diagnostics, effectively replacing over 90 physical buttons. But the system was met with heavy criticism from consumers and auto journalists. Drivers complained that navigating submenus required taking their eyes off the road. So Buick discontinued this feature after a short run. I was a mechanic back then and GM sent me to a two week training on these systems. I only ever serviced one. My questions is: If this small display with limited functions was too distracting to drivers why is it all of a sudden okay on many of todays cars especially EV's? These vehicles have giant touch screens on the middle of the dash that control practically everything. Why is that not too distracting? What changed?

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@FrankBr05713205 @washghost1 There’s more cars like that!?!?

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

Tornado warning. All the inpatients are in the hallways. It’s like a big medical slumber party.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@RoKhanna Rockefeller and Musk are not in competition with Washington or Lincoln. Rockefeller and Musk show has far people can succeed when free. Why the hell is FDR in your list of statesmen? He is widely understood to have prolonged the depression.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@Ackattackack @TheStingisBack I was just gonna mention that one. Probably shouldn’t have been made in the 1980s, or anytime.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@FrankBr05713205 Two other things about the Sebring. The suspension couldn’t take Chicago potholes. I went through the front end every 1-2 years. Secondly, the alternator output went through segmented cable that had interconnections with broad plates clamped together. Must have been cost savings.

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

Stanley Kubrick demanded 70 takes from actors. He let this medically discharged Marine improvise.
In 1985, R. Lee Ermey stood on a film set in England with nothing but memories and a voice that could cut through steel. He was not supposed to be there. Not as an actor, anyway.
Stanley Kubrick had hired him as a technical advisor for Full Metal Jacket. The role of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was already cast with a trained professional. Ermey's job was to teach actors how drill instructors actually behaved.
But Ermey had spent years watching Hollywood get it wrong. He approached Kubrick with a request that bordered on audacity.
"Let me show you what a real drill instructor sounds like."
Kubrick was skeptical. This was a director who shot scenes 40, 50, sometimes 70 times until they were perfect. He controlled every word. Every gesture. Every breath.
But he agreed to watch.
Ermey positioned actors in formation. The cameras rolled. And he began screaming.
For two hours, he unleashed a torrent of creative, devastating verbal assault. Stagehands pelted him with tennis balls and oranges to simulate chaos. He never flinched. Never broke rhythm. Never repeated himself.
Because he wasn't acting.
He was remembering.
Ronald Lee Ermey had enlisted in the Marines at seventeen after a Kansas judge gave him a choice: jail or the military. He chose the Corps. From 1965 to 1967, he served as a drill instructor at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, breaking down civilians and rebuilding them as Marines.
In 1968, he deployed to Vietnam for fourteen months.
Then injuries ended his career. Medical discharge. Twenty-seven years old. No college degree. No plan.
He drifted to the Philippines, enrolled in university using his GI Bill, and stumbled into film work as a technical advisor. Small roles followed. A helicopter pilot in Apocalypse Now. A drill instructor in The Boys in Company C.
But nothing that changed his life.
Until Kubrick watched those tapes.
The director saw something no acting class could manufacture: authenticity so complete it became art. Ermey had produced 150 pages of original insults. His intensity never wavered. His knowledge was absolute.
Kubrick made a decision almost unheard of in his career.
He fired the original actor. He gave Ermey the role. And he allowed him to improvise more than half of his own dialogue.
Stanley Kubrick, the perfectionist who demanded endless takes from every performer, needed only two or three takes from a former drill instructor with no formal training.
Because you cannot fake what is real.
When Full Metal Jacket premiered in 1987, Ermey's performance became instantly iconic. Real drill instructors said it was the most accurate portrayal ever filmed. Veterans said it triggered memories they had buried for decades.
Ermey earned a Golden Globe nomination. He went on to appear in over sixty films. He voiced Sarge in Toy Story. He hosted military programs on the History Channel.
But he never forgot his brothers and sisters in uniform.
In 2002, the Marine Corps awarded him an honorary promotion to Gunnery Sergeant, making him the only retiree in Corps history to receive that recognition. He spent years visiting troops overseas, supporting veterans, and keeping the military spirit alive.
R. Lee Ermey passed away on April 15, 2018. The Marine Corps called him a great American and an even greater Marine.
Think about that journey.
A troubled teenager from Kansas. A drill instructor. A combat veteran. A medical discharge. Odd jobs in foreign countries. And then, at forty-three, convincing one of cinema's most demanding directors to trust him with creative freedom.
He did not succeed because he pretended to be something he wasn't.
He succeeded because he refused to be anything else.
That is not a Hollywood story.
That is a Marine who improvised, adapted, and overcame, all the way to immortality.

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@Svengoolie Thanks so much for airing the clip last week of the new kids taking about old movies. They really have a love of these old films and have an impressive depth of knowledge. They’re going to be great!

[SPHdeORD @SPHdeORD]

@Svengoolie @CrestHillbilly You’re timeless. I bet you die with your chickens on.