Garry Ahlgren

married

[Michelle Maxwell ™ @MichelleMaxwell]

This is so me and my hubby, Anyone else? 😆

[GINGERSKOL💜💛 @GlowSurfing]

HISTORY LESSON ON YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY CARD:
Just in case some of you young whippersnappers (& some older ones) didn’t know this. It’s easy to check out, if you don’t believe it. Be sure and show it to your family and friends. They need a little history lesson on what’s what and it doesn’t matter whether you are Democrat or Republican. Facts are FACTS.
Up until the 1980's, Social Security cards expressly stated the number and card were not to be used for identification purposes.
Since nearly everyone in the United States now has a number, it became convenient to use it anyway and the "NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION" message was removed.
Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program. His promises are in black, with updates in brackets.
1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary [No longer voluntary],
2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual Incomes into the Program [Now 7.65% on the first $90,000, and 15% on the first $90,000 if you’re self-employed],
3.) That the money the participants elected to put into the Program would be deductible from their income for tax purposes each year [No longer tax deductible],
4.) That the money the participants put into the independent ‘Trust Fund’ rather than into the general operating fund, and therefore, would only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other Government program [Under Johnson the money was moved to the General Fund and spent], and
5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income [Under Clinton & Gore up to 85% of your Social Security can be taxed].
Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month — and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to ‘put away’ — you may be interested in the following:
Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the independent ‘Trust Fund’ and put it into the general fund so that Congress could spend it?
A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the democratically controlled House and Senate.
Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding?
A: The Democratic Party.
Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?
A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the ‘tie-breaking’ deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of the US
AND MY FAVORITE:
Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving annuity payments to immigrants?
A: That’s right! Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this country, and at age 65, began to receive Social Security payments! The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into it!
Now, after violating the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away!
And the worst part about it is uninformed citizens believe it! If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe changes will evolve. Maybe not, though. Some Democrats are awfully sure of what isn’t so — but it’s worth a try.
How many people can YOU send this to?

[@amuse @amuse]

https://t.co/4F1eNuuISq

[Denise 🇺🇸 @NoDMsPerfavore]

I am truly perplexed that so many of my friends are against another mosque being built. I think it should be the goal of everyone living in a town to be tolerant regardless of their religious beliefs. Thus the mosque should be allowed, in an effort to promote tolerance.

STAY WITH ME…

That is why I also propose that two nightclubs be opened next door to the mosque; thereby promoting tolerance from within the mosque.

HEAR ME OUT…

We could call one of the clubs, which would be gay, "The Turban Cowboy," and the other, a topless bar, would be called
"You Mecca Me Hot."

Next door should be a butcher shop that specializes in pork, and adjacent to that an open-pit barbecue pork restaurant, called " Iraq of Ribs."

Across the street there could be a lingerie store called "Victoria Keeps Nothing Secret," with sexy mannequins in the window modeling the goods", and on the other side a liquor store called
"Morehammered."

All of this would encourage Muslims to demonstrate the tolerance they demand of us."

Yes we should promote tolerance, and you can do your part by passing this on. And if you are not laughing or smiling at this point.... It is either past your bedtime, or it's midnight at the oasis and time to put your camel to bed. 🤣

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

My wife and I own a pharmacy. Last month we spent days trying to pry one prescription loose from a company that did everything it could to hold onto it.

The drug was everolimus. A generic. It treats cancer and protects transplant patients from rejecting their new organ. Not exotic. Not rare. A pill.

The patient wanted it filled with us because we're cash-pay and cost-plus. No insurance. No PBM. No secret markups, no games. Our price was $318. That's not cheap by our standards — most of what we fill runs under $20 — but it was honest.

Here's what that same prescription looked like on the other side of the counter.

In 2023, Medicare was paying about $6,645 for it. That's roughly 21 times our price for the identical medication. Medicare spent around $240 million on everolimus alone that year. If they'd paid our price, they'd have saved roughly $230 million. On one generic drug.

So how does an insurance company profit off a drug that expensive? Don't they pay for it?

No. You pay for it. In your premiums. Their job isn't to spend less — it's to keep your healthcare dollars circulating inside their own companies. And the tool they use is called spread pricing.

Spread pricing works like this: the middleman bills the health plan one price, pays the pharmacy a lower one, and keeps the difference. You never see it. On TRICARE, they pay an independent pharmacy like mine about $311 to fill everolimus. That barely covers our cost of the drug. Meanwhile the plan gets billed thousands. That gap — north of $6,000 on a single fill — is pure margin the middleman pockets.

Now here's the part they'd rather you not think about.

The pharmacy we were fighting was Accredo. Accredo is owned by Express Scripts. Express Scripts is the pharmacy benefit manager owned by Cigna. Same company, three masks. That nesting-doll structure isn't an accident — it's the whole design. When the pharmacy, the PBM, and the insurer are all one entity, they can shuffle money between their own pockets and call it whatever they want. The confusion is the product.

And this isn't a story about one weird drug. It's the business model.

The FTC has been digging into exactly this. In its January 2025 report on the three biggest PBMs — CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx — staff found those companies marked up specialty generic drugs by hundreds and thousands of percent when dispensing through their own affiliated pharmacies. Just those markups generated more than $7.3 billion above what the drugs actually cost to acquire, from 2017 to 2022. One in five of the specialty generics they studied was marked up over 1,000%. Some cancer generics: over 3,000%. On top of that, the FTC pegged spread pricing on those same drugs at another $1.4 billion.

One example straight from the FTC's files: dimethyl fumarate, a multiple sclerosis drug. Costs about $177 to acquire. The PBMs paid their own pharmacies close to $4,000 for a 30-day supply. Same trick. Different drug.

And they steer the profitable ones to themselves on purpose. Pharmacies affiliated with the big three took in 68% of specialty dispensing revenue in 2023 — up from 54% in 2016. The prescriptions marked up more than $1,000 disproportionately end up at their own pharmacies, not independents like mine.

So when we called to transfer this patient's everolimus to be filled without insurance, it landed like we were asking them to set $6,000 on fire. Of course they stonewalled us.

That's why we fired them.

No insurance means no invisible $6,000 charge buried in a premium you can't itemize. It means the price you see is the price. Ours was $318. Theirs was thousands. Same pill.

[Michelle Maxwell ™ @MichelleMaxwell]

With everything we are hearing right now about ticks this seems like good information to share.

“Here’s what I’ve learned after more ticks than I care to count.
First, whatever your uncle told you, forget it. No matches. No nail polish. No Vaseline. No soap on a cotton ball. All of those do the same terrible thing, they stress the tick out, and a stressed tick empties its gut back into the bite before letting go. Which, if you think about what that actually means for a second, is literally how Lyme and the rest get transmitted so you’re not speeding up its exit. You’re making it throw up into you.
Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip right where the mouthparts enter the skin, not the body, the head. Pull straight up, steady, no twisting, no jerking. It’ll feel like it’s resisting because it is, the mouthparts are barbed. Just keep the pressure on and it lets go in a few seconds. If a piece breaks off in the skin, leave it alone. Your body pushes splinters out. Digging around with a needle does more damage then the fragment ever would.
Clean it with alcohol or soap. Wash your hands.
Now here’s the part most people skip: don’t flush the tick.
Tape it to an index card. Clear packing tape right over the body, write the date and where on your body it was, and stick the card in a drawer. If you come down with anything weird in the next 30 days, rash, fever, joint pain, that flu-that-isn’t-flu feeling, that tick goes with you to the doctor. Some labs will test the tick itself, which is faster and often more reliable than waiting for antibodies to show up in your own blood. A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
The other thing worth saying out loud: if the tick was engorged when you pulled it, and you can’t swear it was off your body within 24 hours, call your doctor that same day. Don’t wait for a rash. Fewer than three out of four Lyme cases even produce the classic bullseye. A single preventive dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of a deer tick bite cuts the Lyme odds way down, and most docs in tick country will write that prescription without giving you a hard time, especially if you walk in with the tick taped to a card and a clear timeline.”

[I am Ken @Ikennect]

Barbara Walters writes:
Unfortunately, many have forgotten and still countless others have never known how Ms. Fonda betrayed not only the idea of our country, but specific men who served and sacrificed during the Vietnam War.
The first part of this is from an F-4E pilot. The pilot's name is Jerry Driscoll, a River Rat. In 1968, the former Commandant of the USAF Survival School was a POW in Ho LoPrison, the "Hanoi Hilton."
Dragged from a stinking cesspit of a cell, cleaned, fed, and dressed in clean PJ's, he was ordered to describe for a visiting American "peace activist" the "lenient and humane treatment" he'd received.
He spat at Ms. Fonda, was clubbed, and was dragged away. During the subsequent beating, he fell forward onto the camp commandant 's feet, which sent that officer berserk.
In 1978, the Air Force Colonel still suffered from double vision (which permanently ended his flying career) from the Commandant's frenzied application of a wooden baton.
From 1963-65, Col. Larry Carrigan was in the 47FW/DO (F-4E's). He spent 6 years in the "Hanoi Hilton". . . The first three of which his family only knew he was "missing in action." His wife lived on faith that he was still alive. His group, too, got the cleaned-up, fed and clothed routine in preparation for a "peace delegation" visit.
They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they were alive and still survived. Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his Social Security Number on it, in the palm of his hand. When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little encouraging snippets like: "Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?" and "Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?" Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper.
She took them all without missing a beat. . . At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge and handed him all the little pieces of paper...
Three men died from the subsequent beatings. Colonel Carrigan was almost number four but he survived, which is the only reason we know of her actions that day.
I was a civilian economic development adviser in Vietnam, and was captured by the North Vietnamese communists in South Vietnam in 1968, and held prisoner for over 5 years.
I spent 27 months in solitary confinement; one year in a cage in Cambodia; and one year in a 'black box' in Hanoi. My North Vietnamese captors deliberately poisoned and murdered a female missionary, a nurse in a leprosarium in Banme Thuot, South Vietnam, whom I buried in the jungle near the Cambodian border. At one time, I weighed only about 90 lbs. (My normal weight is 170 lbs.)
We were Jane Fonda's "war criminals."
When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with her. I said yes, for I wanted to tell her about the real treatment we POWs received. . . and how different it was from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by her as "humane and lenient."
Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on my knees, with my arms outstretched with a large steel weight placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane.
I had the opportunity to meet with Jane Fonda soon after I was released. I asked her if she would be willing to debate me on TV. She never did answer me.
These first-hand experiences do not exemplify someone who should be honored as part of "100 Years of Great Women." Lest we forget. . . "100 Years of Great Women" should never include a traitor whose hands are covered with the blood of so many patriots.
There are few things I have strong visceral reactions to, but Hanoi Jane's participation in blatant treason, is one of them. Please take the time to forward to as many people as you possibly can. It will eventually end up on her computer, and she needs to know that we will never forget. See less

[Patrick Byrne @PatrickByrne]

If you’re not following Hotep Jesus, you should be. He understands the world so well.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet.

His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard.

The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language.

Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort.

Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes.

After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in.

Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter.

She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying.

The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it.

The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works.

Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them.

You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank.

He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort.

Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning.

The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely.

This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique.

The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies.

Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words.

Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work.

His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning.

He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about.

He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that.

The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours.

They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

[🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿InsideLucysHead🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿© @InsideLucysHead]

BBC announcement

From the BBC - Read by #JohnCleese.

ANNOUNCEMENT

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have therefore raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.”

Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.”

The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the Blitz in 1940, when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorised from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance.”

The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots have raised their threat level from “Pissed Off” to “Let’s get the Bastards.” They don’t have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide.” The only two higher levels in France are “Collaborate” and “Surrender.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France‘s white flag factory, effectively paralysing the country’s military capability.

Italy has increased the alert level from “Shout Loudly and Excitedly” to “Elaborate Military Posturing.” Two more levels remain: “Ineffective Combat Operations” and “Change Sides.”

The Germans have increased their alert state from “Disdainful Arrogance” to “Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs.” They also have two higher levels: “Invade a Neighbour” and “Lose.”

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual; the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Australia, meanwhile, has raised its security level from “No worries” to “She’ll be alright, Mate.” Three more escalation levels remain: “Crikey!” “I think we’ll need to cancel the barbie this weekend”, and “The barbie is cancelled.” So far, no situation has ever warranted the use of the final escalation level.

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@elonmusknews30 Hi

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@Chicago1Ray 👍

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@tina247_t ❤️

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@LeavittMedia 👍

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@ElephantSignal 👍

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@CharlieK_news 🤚

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@TRUMP_ARMY_ @AlinaHabba 👍

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@SaveAmericaNew Why only half?

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@RightScopee 👍

[Garry Ahlgren @garry_ahl]

@WakeUpPatriott 👍