Robin Williams’ emotional tribute to the American Flag leaves an entire stadium speechless — then in tears.
Is there a single Hollywood star who would give this performance today?
Total Patriot.
RIP Legend 🇺🇸
Elon Musk just proved that ownership in America is a legal fiction.
Musk: “You get taxed on what you earn, you get taxed on what you buy, and you get taxed on what you own.”
Think about what property tax actually means.
You worked for decades. Paid it off in full. The deed is in your name.
Stop paying the government its annual fee. Watch them take it and sell it to someone who will.
You never owned that house. You were leasing it from an entity you never signed a contract with.
Income tax tells the same truth in softer packaging.
The government does not take a portion of your earnings. They decide how much of your own labor you are permitted to keep.
That is not semantics. It is a confession of who the system believes your time belongs to first.
Sales tax buries itself in the receipt. Two people exchange value voluntarily. A third party who contributed nothing takes a cut simply for allowing it to happen.
Now stack all three.
Taxed when you create. Taxed when you spend. Taxed when you hold. Taxed again when you die and try to pass it to your children.
At no point in that cycle does the system recognize your output as yours.
Because money is not an abstraction. It is crystallized human lifespan.
Every dollar taxed is an hour you already lived, already bled for, already gone.
The state is not managing an economy. It is claiming dominion over time you will never get back.
And spending it on systems you never asked for and actively oppose.
The institution extracting all of it faces zero obligation to perform. A contractor who delivers nothing gets fired. A bureaucracy that burns through trillions gets a budget increase the next fiscal year.
SpaceX pays taxes to the agencies that obstruct its launches. Tesla funds the regulators drafting rules to shield its competitors.
The builders are not subsidizing government. They are financing their own friction.
The tax code is 74,000 pages long. Not because the economy demands it. Because the extraction had to be buried in enough complexity that you would stop asking who it was designed to protect.
The past belonged to the people who taxed the world.
The future belongs to the people who build it.
The official story of alpha-gal syndrome is tidy. A lone star tick bites you, and months later you can no longer eat red meat. Tidy stories should make you suspicious. Here is what the tidy version leaves out. 🧵
When a patient is in the hospital, doctors used to use paper notes to communicate with one another.
In the EHR era, the note stopped being a clinical communication tool and became a billing and compliance artifact. The results have been a disaster.
One JAMA study found notes got 60.1% longer from 2009 to 2018, while redundancy rose 22%. ONC has explicitly acknowledged that clinicians use templates to stuff notes with unnecessary information into the chart to meet billing requirements, creating note bloat.
The clinical note was no longer a method of communication. It was a billing document.
So hospitals layered secure chat on top just to communicate the actual plan of care. And even that workaround is not working.
A 2024 JAMA study found more secure messaging was associated with more time on the phone, not less. Doctors needed to call to clarify the now constant message stream.
Another study found higher messaging volume was associated with higher odds of errors. More messages means a higher cognitive load with most of the information being low-importance. This increased cognitive load leads to more errors.
We took what should have been efficiency improving technology, a computerized chart, and so over-regulated it and misaligned incentives that it has led to harmful downstream effects.
Now, please don't do this with AI...