Physician, healthcare analyst, with a penchant for predictive modeling. Former Chief Scientist, CLARA analytics, Founder & CEO, Persimmon AI . Now consulting.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of Americans signed their names to a piece of parchment and made a promise no nation had ever made before: that we're all created equal, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We're the only nation in history built not on ethnicity, or blood, or geography but on an idea. That's always been what makes us exceptional. We chose that path 250 years ago but that’s where the work began, not where it ended. Every generation has had to choose it again. At Valley Forge, at Gettysburg, on the beaches of Normandy, in the streets of Selma. Americans recommitted themselves to the principles on which our nation was founded.
Now it's our turn.
There's nothing guaranteed about our democracy. We have to fight for it, defend it, and earn it. Over and over, year after year. That's not a burden. That's what it means to be an American.
250 years in, we still haven't fully lived up to those words in the Declaration. But we've never walked away from them, and this July 4, I hope all of us can commit to one thing: that we never will. I don't believe we're as divided as we're told we are. I've bet my whole life on the American people, and I'm not stopping now.
Happy 250th birthday, America. Our story isn't finished. Let's keep writing it together.
A 33-year-old woman at MIT wrote the code that ran inside the Apollo 11 lunar lander, and 20 seconds before Neil Armstrong touched the moon, her program made a decision the astronauts didn't know was happening that was the only reason the mission didn't crash.
Her name was Margaret Hamilton.
She led the team writing every line of code that would fly humans to the moon and back. The part almost nobody knows is that she had to fight to be allowed to do the work at all.
Code in 1965 was not treated as real work.
Rockets were serious. Circuits were serious. Writing code was something the men at NASA thought secretaries could do on the side. Hamilton was told this to her face more than once.
So she started calling what her team did "software engineering."
She used the phrase on purpose. In meetings. In memos. To force people to treat it as a discipline instead of a chore. Colleagues laughed at her the first few times she said it out loud.
That phrase is now the name of the biggest engineering profession on earth.
The story of what her code did on July 20, 1969 is the one every kid should be taught.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 3 minutes from touching down when the computer inside the lunar module started flashing an alarm.
1202.
Then again. Then 1201. Five alarms in four minutes. The computer was telling the astronauts it could not finish everything it had been asked to do.
The computer they were flying with had less memory than a modern microwave.
Someone on the checklist had left a switch in the wrong position, and a radar the astronauts did not even need right then was flooding the computer with data. It was eating around 13% of the machine's brain at the exact moment every second mattered.
In almost any other system, that overload would have frozen the machine.
A frozen machine 30,000 feet above the moon means a crash. It means two dead astronauts and a third one orbiting alone above them, waiting for a signal that would never come.
Hamilton's code did something else.
She had built the software with a rule almost nobody in her field was using at the time. When the machine ran out of room, it would not treat every task as equally important. It would look at the list of jobs it had been asked to do, throw out the ones that could wait, and keep running only the ones keeping the crew alive.
The radar was the low priority job.
The landing was the highest.
So the computer did what she had told it to do. It dumped the radar. It kept flying. The alarm was not a failure. It was the machine reporting that it was handling the overload exactly the way she had designed it to.
Down in Houston, a 24-year-old engineer named Jack Garman recognized the alarm from a test his team had run months earlier. He shouted "Go" to the flight controller. The controller shouted it up to the crew. The landing kept going.
Armstrong touched the surface with 25 seconds of fuel left.
The part that gets lost in every retelling is why Hamilton had built that safety net in the first place.
NASA had not asked for it.
She had added it on her own, years earlier, because her 4-year-old daughter Lauren had once crashed the simulator by pressing a button during a test. The button was one the astronauts had been told they would never press.
Hamilton wanted the code to survive that button press anyway.
Her bosses told her it was a waste of time. Astronauts do not make mistakes.
She insisted. The safety net went in.
Two years later, on the way to the moon, an astronaut left a switch in the wrong position. The exact class of mistake she had been told would never happen.
There is a photograph of her from that period.
She is standing next to a stack of paper as tall as she is. Every page in that stack is the code her team wrote for the mission. She is smiling at the camera like she knows something the rest of the aerospace industry has not figured out yet.
In 2016, Barack Obama put the Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck and said the astronauts did not have much time, but thankfully, they had Margaret Hamilton.
Every autopilot in every plane you have ever flown on uses a version of what she invented. Every pacemaker. Every self driving car. Every satellite in orbit.
The idea that a machine should know which job matters most and drop the rest when it runs out of room is now the foundation of almost every safety system on the planet.
She wrote it because a 4 year old crashed a simulator and nobody else thought it was worth fixing.
The men in the room laughed at her for calling it engineering.
Then her code was the only thing in the sky that did not fail.
“I work the front desk at a small doctor’s office, and I wish people could see what happens on the other side of the phone.
Every day, older patients call us confused.
They are told to use the patient portal, upload documents, check lab results online, fill out forms before the visit, and confirm everything through a link.
Some of them do not know what a portal is.
Some do not have a smartphone.
Some have one, but they are afraid to click the wrong thing.
Last week, a man in his late 80s called about his test results.
He said, “Ma’am, I don’t mean to bother you, but the computer says I have a message and I don’t know how to open it.”
He sounded ashamed.
That broke my heart.
He should not have to feel ashamed for needing a human being.
Technology can be helpful. I understand that.
But when people who built this country are made to feel helpless because everything became a login and a password, we have gone too far.
Not everything needs to be an app.
Not every answer should be hidden behind a screen.
Sometimes people need a voice.
A patient person.
A real human who says, “Don’t worry, I can help you.”
Progress should not leave seniors behind.
Because one day, the world will move faster than us too.
And I hope someone is kind enough to slow down.
~Unknown
"Their owner passed away alone in his apartment. Nobody found him for three days. The dogs waited the whole time." When animal control finally arrived, Max and Buddy were sitting by the front door. Not destructive. Not panicked. Just sitting. Waiting. Doing what he had always taught them to do. They came to our shelter with nothing. No records. No vet history. No family contact. Just each other. And one old tennis ball that somebody thought to grab on the way out. That was eleven days ago. Every morning they sit at the kennel door and wait. Every time they hear footsteps they both stand up. Every time those footsteps pass — they go back and lie down together. They don't know he's not coming. They just know he always came back before. Max is 6. Buddy is 5. Both healthy. Both gentle. Both heartbreakingly good dogs. Neither one will do well separated. They have never spent a night apart. They were somebody's whole world. Now they need somebody to be theirs. If you are in the USA and you have room in your home and your heart — please share this until it reaches the right person. They've already waited long enough. Drop a ❤️ for Max and Buddy. And please — SHARE. One share could be everything.
Pope Leo recently pointed to something that feels especially relevant in the age of AI: the difference between knowing things and actually living them.
AI can process information, spot patterns, and generate answers. But so much of what shapes a person—friendship, love, responsibility, work, joy, and loss—comes from firsthand experience.
As AI continues to evolve, his comments raise a simple but important question: What can only be learned by being human?
On the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signs the Reproductive Health Records Privacy Act, which protects the private health records of women seeking reproductive care.
"Health care records exist to treat patients, not surveil and punish them."
BREAKING: NO JET FOR YOU! Jamie Raskin reminds Trump that the Constitution’s ban on gifts does NOT contain an exception for $400 million Boeings!
Queried on the matter by PabloReports on the steps of the Capitol, Rep. Jamie Raskin pushed back on the idea that Donald Trump could walk away from office with control over the luxury jet gifted by Qatar, pointing to a part of the Constitution that MAGA Republicans suddenly seem reluctant to discuss.
Asked whether Trump gets to keep the aircraft after leaving office, Raskin's answer was simple.
"No, he does not. You know why? Because the Constitution says he can't do it."
It's worth noting that Raskin isn't some pundit offering an opinion. He's a former constitutional law professor and ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, making him one of the people in Congress most qualified to explain what the Constitution actually says. The committee handles constitutional questions surrounding presidential power and accountability.
The issue isn't hypothetical. Trump has repeatedly defended accepting the plane and has said it would eventually be transferred to his presidential library after he leaves office.
Critics argue that it amounts to keeping control of a $400 million gift from a foreign government. Congress never approved that arrangement.
The irony is that MAGA keeps describing the aircraft as a "gift" that saves money. Even setting aside the constitutional questions, the plane still has to be rebuilt to Air Force One standards, estimates for which have ranged as high as $1 billion – hardly "free."
Raskin pointed to the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts, payments, offices, or titles from foreign governments without congressional consent.
The plane doesn't belong to Trump, Raskin insisted. If he wants to keep it, he has to do what every other president has done and ask Congress.
To make the point, Raskin brought up Abraham Lincoln, someone Trump likes to compare himself to. During the Civil War, Lincoln received elephant tusks from the King of Siam and still asked Congress whether he could keep them. Congress said no, and the gift went to the State Department.
Lincoln asked permission over elephant tusks. Trump wants to let slide a $400 million jet with at least that much investment by taxpayers in renovations.
Raskin said that if Trump refuses to follow the constitutional process, Congress can take possession of the aircraft and determine what happens to it, including returning it to Qatar.
This issue is remarkably simple. If a foreign government gives a president a $400 million aircraft, does the Constitution apply?
We agree with Raskin. There is no rational argument that it doesn’t. He can't have it.
Illinois Governor Pritzker announces the Reproductive Health Records Privacy Act — legislation which ensures that medical information related to abortion procedures cannot be shared with out of state actors without the explicit consent of the patient.
Bob Kagan on U.S.-Iran MoU: "It's not a deal and it's not gonna lead to a deal…Trump has paid the Iranians billions for a fig leaf that allows him to come back to the U.S. and say, 'I've got a deal, peace is at hand'…Iran gives up absolutely nothing in return."
BREAKING: NOT SO FAST! Federal judge reopens Trump’s IRS case and demands to know if her court was defrauded.
Judge Kathleen Williams has had enough.
In a brief but devastating order Friday, the federal judge in Miami reopened Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS — a case Trump had voluntarily dismissed last week specifically to avoid her scrutiny — and ordered Trump's lawyers to explain by June 12th why she shouldn't find that the entire scheme was a fraud perpetrated against her court.
The judge's language was pointed and precise. She said she wanted to investigate "grievous allegations" that the deal to resolve the case was "premised on deception." She asserted that she was "empowered to investigate serious misconduct" and demanded answers to two devastating questions: was "the court the victim of a fraud," and did Trump collude with his own government to settle the case specifically "to avoid judicial scrutiny"?
The answer to both questions, based on everything that has already been reported, appears to be yes.
Judge Williams had been circling this case for weeks before Trump pulled it. She had openly questioned how Trump could sue an agency he controls, with government lawyers who answer to him, producing a settlement negotiated with officials he appointed. She ordered both sides to explain whether they were actually adversaries or secretly colluding. Trump dismissed the case the day before those briefs were due.
Then, after she closed it, the Justice Department released not one but two extraordinary agreements — a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Trump's allies, and a separate one-page document permanently barring the IRS from ever auditing Trump, his family, or his businesses. Agreements that had apparently been negotiated while the case was supposedly active before her court.
Judge Williams cited the New York Times report revealing that the IRS had prepared a 25-page memo outlining strong defenses against Trump's suit — defenses the Justice Department never raised in court, never filed, never mentioned.
Her order came directly in response to the filing by 35 former federal judges — appointed by presidents of both parties — who called the scheme a fraud and urged her to reopen the case.
She listened.
"We stand ready to work with the court as it investigates this matter," said Norman Eisen, who represented the former judges.
Trump tried to flip the table before she could see the cards. She just put them back on the table.
If you can’t wait to see the Justice Department try to explain itself, please like and share this post everywhere.
Barack: You told me all those years ago that you couldn’t promise me the world, but you could promise me an interesting life. Of course, you outdid yourself and managed to give me both.
Eight years in the crucible, and not once did you melt from the heat. Not once did you let it harden you. Instead, you used it to reveal your truest essence: your stubborn optimism and unflinching courage, your dazzling brilliance and unpretentious decency, your ferocious work ethic and absolutely unshakable moral fiber.
A brand new bridge between Detroit and Canada is finished and ready to open. It would speed up traffic for millions of trucks, cut delays for American businesses, and help the auto industry that employs people in every state. There is just one problem.
Donald Trump won’t let it open.
Here is why.
The family that owns the old bridge stands to lose business when the new one opens. So in January, they gave one million dollars to a pro-Trump super PAC.
Weeks later they met with Trump’s Commerce Secretary.
He called Trump.
Hours after that, Trump announced he would block the new bridge. The opening was set for June 12. It got canceled the day before. The bridge sits there finished and empty.
Now here is the part that should make every taxpayer angry.
Canada paid for the entire bridge.
Every dollar. And the United States already owns half of it for free. Trump is holding up a bridge we got for nothing, to protect a donor who wrote him a check, while picking a fight with our closest ally and biggest trading partner.
This is corruption in plain sight.
A billionaire pays, and the President delivers. American workers and businesses pay the price.
Open the bridge. A government should work for the people, not for whoever writes the biggest check.
https://t.co/9o9Gz9UrBo
BREAKING: GAUNTLET THROWN! Gavin Newsom's top lawyer demands that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche investigate Trump after the Justice Department began probing the governor and his wife.
This is a brilliant countermove...
“Calling this investigation a fishing expedition is actually too generous. If your commitment to rooting out corruption were serious, the enormous resources that you have poured into this investigation looking for a crime that does not exist would be focused elsewhere," legal affairs secretary David Sapp wrote to Blanche.
Not content to leave it at that, Sapp also requested immediate access to “all documents and records including but not limited to memoranda, emails, text messages, and Signal messages” related to the sham investigation into the governor.
He added that Blanche should instead turn his attention to "the open-air corruption market that the White House has become.” The fact that there is a tradition of not prosecuting a sitting president is “no excuse for ignoring open and notorious corruption by his family and those around him.”
“The United States Department of Justice selectively leaked uncorroborated details about ongoing investigative matters involving the Governor and First Partner, so it should not be a problem for you to confirm whether US DOJ has opened any investigations into the instances of apparent public corruption detailed above involving the President and his allies,” concluded Sapp.
On Monday, Newsom revealed that the Justice Department has begun investigating him and his wife in a blatant attempt to waylay his possible presidential run. It represents just the latest instance of Trump weaponizing the DOJ — a once hallowed nonpartisan institution — to go after his political enemies. It's the kind of thing we once believed could only happen in tinpot dictatorships.
"He isn't coming after me because of mean tweets, but because I am considering running for President," Newsom stated. "He hates that I consistently call him out. He is simply the most corrupt President in American history. We have nothing to hide Mr. President, come after me. I am not going anywhere. The country is watching."
Of course, the chances of Blanche actually turning around and investigating his boss are precisely zero. Blanche is a MAGA hatchet man to the core. He'd sooner reduce the DOJ's credibility to ashes than actually do his job on behalf of the American people.
That said, this messaging from Newsom's camp is incredibly important. We can't allow this White House's corruption to become normalized. Just because Trump and his cronies refuse to stop breaking the law doesn't mean we should stop calling it out!
Please ❤️ and share if you'd gladly vote for Gavin Newsom!