Kevin Ebbesen

Man of titles: Magician, Reverend, Father, Husband, Professor

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@MartyBergerson I like half this post. Let’s flip it around though. Det 41 Buff 30

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@Mike_kim714 @Titleist 67

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@Mike_kim714 32.5

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry.

The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine.

The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true.

The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either.

The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought.

The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to.

The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus.

He is confident.

He has always been confident.

The confidence has never been the problem.

The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@stoolgambling @DKSportsbook Penn

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

So much tax payer waste everywhere. It must stop.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Neguse: Where is this company headquartered?

Noem: I don’t know.

Neguse: I don’t know either. We can’t find it. We did find an address that’s registered to a political operative. This company that received 143 million dollars was incorporated 8 days before this contract went out.

You want the American people to believe that this is all above board, that $143 million of taxpayer money just happened to go to this one company that doesn't have a headquarters, doesn't have a website, has never done work for the federal government before and is registered apparently or attached to a residence from a political operative, and of course one of the subcontractors of that contract, as you know, is a political firm that's tied to, to you back when you were governor of South Dakota?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

What he said

[Matthew Cappucci @MatthewCappucci]

CONGRATULATIONS to the chronically-undereducated, who evidently experienced their first snow this weekend. 🤗

Have you been trying to light the snow on fire?

Does it seem fluffier than normal?

Do you think the government is sending pretend snow to your house?

[Owen Oszust @Owen_Oszust]

"He (Kur Teng) and my mom will be going at it in a nursing home gym, and we'll see how he does."

Tom Izzo gave this response when asked about his comment to MSU's Kur Teng. Izzo told Teng he couldn't guard his 99-year-old mother in a viral clip.

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@Mike_kim714 WM for the win:

[Wall Street Mav @WallStreetMav]

RFK Jr: Why did "gluten allergies" go up so much in 2006?

"we discovered that Roundup was a desiccant. And what that means, if you spray it on a crop, it will actually dry out the crop. And one of the big enemies of the farmer is that if there's rain around the time of harvest, their crops can get wet, and they get moldy, and then it ruins the entire silo."

"What Monsanto did is they began telling farmers, spray this on the crop, on your wheat, right before harvest or at the time of harvest. And it was so popular that about 85 % of the Roundup that has been used in history has been used since 2006. A large part of that is as a desiccant. And what that meant, is for the first time they're spraying it on food right at harvest."

"Not early in the season when they have a chance to wash off, but actually just before you're going to eat it. And they're spraying it for the first time on wheat because there was no such thing as Roundup Ready Wheat. They started spraying it on wheat as a desiccant. And so 2006 marks the day when suddenly these gluten allergies began exploding. The celiac disease and all these kind of wheat problems that we started seeing in this country."

If you measure it back and say, when did it start? You can look and draw a red line at this 2006 and it's the year that they began spraying it on.

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@Mike_kim714 39

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@Mike_kim714 21

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

In a nutshell…

[Jillian Michaels @JillianMichaels]

Appreciate the wait Stephen...

There isn’t one cause. America’s division is the result of several forces hitting at the same time, each pouring gasoline on the others. Here are the big ones:

1. Social media rewired the country

Platforms didn’t just connect people — they radicalized them.
Algorithms reward outrage, conflict, and extremism because that content keeps people glued to the screen.
So the loudest, angriest voices get the most visibility, while moderate voices disappear completely.

Result:
People now live in different information worlds. Not different opinions — different realities.

2. Political parties realized division is profitable

Both parties figured out that fear and anger raise more money, get more clicks, and turn out more voters than unity ever will.

So political messaging shifted from:
“Here’s what we stand for,”
to
“Your neighbor wants to destroy the country — donate now.”

When politics becomes a war instead of a debate, your fellow citizen starts looking like the enemy.

3. Collapse of trust in every major institution

Government, media, public health, corporations, banks, higher education — trust in all of them cratered over the last 20 years.

Why?
Scandals, corruption, hypocrisy, manipulation, and blatant incompetence — across the board.

When no one trusts the referee, the game becomes a brawl.

4. The media abandoned neutrality for tribal loyalty

Outlets don’t even pretend to be neutral anymore.
They’re audience-targeting businesses.
So news isn’t designed to inform you — it’s designed to affirm your worldview and keep you locked in.

This creates two Americas:
•One that believes one storyline
•One that believes the total opposite

And each thinks the other is insane.

5. Economic stress made people angrier and more reactive

Stagnant wages, insane housing prices, medical debt, cost-of-living spikes, corporate consolidation, and the destruction of the middle class created a pressure cooker.

People under financial strain are more irritable, less patient, and more prone to blaming “the other side.”

6. Cultural shifts happened faster than people could process

Everything — gender norms, family structures, technology, entertainment, values — changed at warp speed.

Some people embraced it.
Some people panicked.
Some people felt erased.
Some felt liberated.

Rapid cultural change always produces backlash. Always.

7. Foreign adversaries exploited every crack

Russia, China, Iran, and others pumped disinformation into American social platforms to widen racial, political, religious, and economic divides.

They don’t need to defeat the U.S. militarily if the U.S. tears itself apart internally.

8. People stopped talking to each other in real life

COVID isolation, remote work, online communities, political bubbles — all of it reduced face-to-face humanizing interaction.

It’s easy to hate a caricature online.
It’s harder when someone is sitting across from you.

9. Loss of a unifying narrative

From WWII to the Cold War to the space race, America used to have shared goals and shared enemies.

Now?
No common project. No shared mission.
Just a lot of grievance and competing identities.

When a nation stops having a “we,” everything becomes “us vs. them.”

Bottom line

America’s division isn’t random and it’s not accidental.
It’s the predictable result of:

technology + political incentives + financial pressure + collapsing institutions + cultural upheaval + foreign interference.

You fix the division by addressing those root causes — not by attacking each other.

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@Mike_kim714 77

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Here is Peter Thiel’s email to Zuck and Andreessen in Jan-2020 predicting socialism.

Tl;dr too much student debt and lack of affordable housing keeps young people with negative capital for too long. And without a stake in the capitalist system, they will turn against it.

[Vani Hari @thefoodbabe]

New front group "Americans for Ingredient Transparency" with every major BIG FOOD company being a member has formed to stop all state action on food safety & undermine Governors who have courageously signed bills to reform the food industry. They named their X handle "@safeingredients" HOW SHAMEFUL. Please spread the word.

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@NFLonFOX FU for leaving the Detroit game.

[Kevin Ebbesen @KevinEbbesen]

@MLB make a phone call. The people want it!

@tigers

[Ben Verlander @BenVerlander]

Hello @tigers and @Pirates

Paul Skenes vs Tarik Skubal

Please. We beg of you. Do it.

Sincerely, Baseball Fans