Laura Sheehan

Contemplative Cross-stitch

[Not the Bee @Not_the_Bee]

Important context from the mainstream media is that the plane wasn't being hijacked for at least 90% of the total flight time.

[SatoriVerdure @SatoriVerdure]

Socialism is slavery, capitalism is freedom.

[Laura Sheehan @MissLRS75]

Did a workout today. Husband put on a Metallica playlist on Youtube.
Me: This is a really long album!
Him: This isn't an album, it's greatest hits.
Me: The music is actually really good, but I didn't like the story.
Him: It's not a story!
Me: Oh, ok...who is that guy?
Him: *incredulously* That's (I still don't remember the name of the guy...lead singer or something)
Me: All I know is Dave Mustaine. And who is Lars?
😂

[Laura Sheehan @MissLRS75]

@BumpstockBarbie I had a friend who played "Here Comes The Sun". Unironically at her own memorial service. She was all wrong in all the right ways. I miss her so much.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

From Plato to Bernie and AOC – A Brief History of Communism

Twenty-four centuries, one idea. It always starts the same way and always ends the same way.

1. Plato, 380 BC. The world is badly made, the wise should redesign it, and the rulers may lie to the people for their own good – he called it the noble lie. Property abolished among the guardians, the family abolished with it. Everything since is a version of it, with progressively worse writing and progressively higher body counts.

2. The millenarian sects. Property abolished, the chosen in charge, purification required – a thousand years before capitalism existed. The idea needs no economy to appear.

3. Rousseau, 1762. Man is good, institutions corrupt him, so institutions must be remade. The General Will – the collective desire of the people, which the correct leader can identify and implement regardless of what individual people actually want. The philosophical foundation of every subsequent revolution that murdered people in the name of their own liberation. Whoever refuses to obey shall be forced to be free. Rousseau personally abandoned all five of his children to the orphanage. He wrote extensively about the correct upbringing of children. This is a pattern.

4. Kant and Hegel. Kant splits the world as we see it from the world as it is. Hegel adds that history is going somewhere. Together they supply the phrase that ends every argument: the wrong side of history.

5. 1789, French Revolution. The idea gets a country. Virtue is the goal, and virtue turns out to need enforcement. Four years from liberation to the guillotine and the Terror.

6. Marx, 1848. The same idea in a scientific costume – now you weren’t arguing for it, you were reading the future. Written by a man who had never worked in a factory, funded by a man who owned one.

7. Lenin, 1917. The vanguard party: a small group of professionals who know what the workers need better than the workers do. Delivered to Russia in a sealed train by a German general who wanted Russia out of the war. He got that, and more.

8. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. What it looks like when it wins. Terror as government, and a lie so complete that people lost the ability to tell what they thought from what they had to say. Tens of millions dead in China, a quarter of the population in Cambodia. Not a deviation. The same premise, applied with enthusiasm. Collectivization, the gulag, the Great Leap, the killing fields – roughly a hundred million dead in one century. Each time preceded by intellectuals explaining why this time would be different.

9. The Frankfurt School. The workers in the West refused to revolt, so the explanation changed: the problem is cultural, and Western civilization itself is the oppressor and has to be deconstructed. Everything to be criticized, nothing to be built.

10. Gramsci, Spinelli, Dutschke and 1968. Don’t storm the parliament – get a job in the editorial office. Power in the West rests on consent, and consent is made in schools and newspapers – so take those instead. The long march through the institutions. The generation that failed in the streets became the professors, editors and judges. It worked, which is why elections now change the government but not the direction.

1989 – the system collapses, the archives opened, and in the Western universities almost nobody changed their mind. A faith, not a theory.

11. Bernie and AOC. Same idea, new clothes, and nobody left who has read the source material. Free everything, paid for by the billionaires. Honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988 – three years before it collapsed – and came back impressed. Three houses. Net worth in the millions of dollars. Democratic socialists. The reasoning is Plato’s, the aesthetic is TikTok.

From Plato to Bernie and AOC: Even communism isn’t immune to decay…

What follows

12. The lie is not a side effect. It is the system.

13. Where truth is handed out instead of found, anyone who insists on finding it is in the way.

14. It survives because it protects positions, not beliefs. Ask who is best for the job and every protected position is at risk. Ask who belongs in the room and the same people stay in it for life.

15. The managerial class is the nomenklatura. Same selection, same script, same immunity to results. Only the letterhead changed.

16. Where everything needs permission, permission becomes the currency – and whoever knows the apparatus rules, whoever wins the election.

17. Silence is not ignorance. It is knowledge plus a calculation: speaking costs everything, silence is free.

18. Underneath, it runs on two fuels: envy and fear. Envy supplies the motive – someone else has what you don’t, and the system promises to take it. Fear supplies the compliance – everyone can see what happens to those who say the wrong thing. Neither has anything to do with justice, and neither ever built anything.

19. The idea never learns, because the error is not in the implementation. It is in the premise: that the "wise" can plan the lives of the many better than the many can plan their own.

20. The answer is not a better plan for society. It is refusing to let anyone hold the pen.

Reality is not negotiable. Say so out loud, build things that work, and hand them to your children.

Tell the truth. Have courage. And build.

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

Michigan taxpayers financed the University of Michigan.

The university then expanded into healthcare, absorbed community hospitals, bought physician practices, and built a system with 12 hospitals and hundreds of clinics.

Now those same taxpayers return as patients and pay commercial prices to use what their money financed.

Quite a business model. The taxpayer finances the expansion.

The taxpayer loses the independent alternatives. Then the taxpayer receives the invoice.

And if you think it’s not happening in your state, think again.

[Laura Sheehan @MissLRS75]

One of the questions I struggle with in adulthood is where do I put stickers?

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

Why is healthcare expensive?

Imagine clipping a coupon at Target.
You hand it to the cashier.

Target keeps the discount.
You pay full price.

Congratulations, you know understand government healthcare.

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

The number one reason healthcare is so expensive is not tax-exempt hospitals.

It is not insurance companies.

It is the incentives created by government.

At an independent physician’s office, Medicare makes one payment.

For services delivered through a hospital outpatient department (HOPD), Medicare makes two payments.

Here is an example:

Lumbar epidural in a physician’s office: $256.

The same procedure through a hospital outpatient department: $741.

Nearly three times the payment! It’s utterly ridiculous to be $40 trillion in the hole and then pay 3x as much for the same thing.

Same physician.
Same patient.
Same procedure.
Different owner.
Higher bill.

Changing ownership triples the payment.

That payment gap gives hospitals a government-funded reason to acquire physician practices.

The more practices a hospital acquires, the more care it moves through the higher-paying system.

This arithmetic is not difficult. Congress simply finds it inconvenient. Government rewards hospitals for acquiring physician practices.

Congress banned physician-owned hospitals and froze most existing ones at their 2010 capacity.

Apparently, physicians are trustworthy enough to perform the surgery. Owning the hospital is where Congress draws the line. Congress approves lawyers, MBAs, and Felons. Not physicians.

Tax-exempt hospital systems pay no federal income tax, no state income tax and no property tax.

Your grandmother pays property tax.

She made the rookie mistake of not calling her house a hospital campus.

Government also created 340B.

In 2025, 340B covered entities purchased $100 billion in discounted outpatient drugs.

That is what they purchased.

It does not tell us what they billed.

It does not tell us how much they made.

The hospital buys the drug at the 340B price.

The hospital bills the employer the full contracted allowable amount.

The patient pays a deductible or coinsurance calculated from that amount.

The patient’s name unlocks the discount.

The hospital keeps it.

Acquire an oncology practice.
Extend the discount.
Keep the spread.

In 34 states and Washington, D.C., hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers and radiology centers must ask government for permission to open or expand.

The incumbent hospital gets to object.

Naturally.

Who should decide whether a community needs competition if not the company facing it?

Then politicians pretend to be surprised when independent physicians disappear, hospital markets consolidate and employer premiums rise.

Hospitals and insurance companies are not innocent.

Hospitals lobby to preserve these advantages. Insurers pass the resulting expense into next year’s premiums.

Everyone follows incentives.

Government chose these incentives.

The people you elected wrote them into law, protected them for years and now hold hearings to discover who could possibly have done this.

Want lower healthcare costs?

Pay the same amount for the same service.

Let physicians own and expand hospitals.

End Certificate of Need laws.

Make 340B discounts follow the patient.

Americans must demand that government stop subsidizing consolidation and picking winners and losers.

Washington pays hospitals more to consolidate, blocks physicians from competing, exempts the winners from taxes and then lectures America about greed.

[Cynthia Holt @Ghostofcynthia]

The three biggest killers of human life in history are socialism/communism, Islam, and abortion.

Democrats support all three.

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

EVERY LIE HIRES A BUREAUCRAT.

Every scam writes a rule.
Every theft installs a camera.

Every fraudulent claim creates another audit.

We complain when bureaucracy grows. We rarely ask what fed it. Someone lied, so now everyone needs documentation.

Someone stole, so now everyone gets searched. Someone abused the freedom they received, so now nobody receives it.

The bureaucrat did not always cause the problem. Sometimes the bureaucrat is the receipt.

Dishonesty does more than harm the person who believed the lie. It raises the cost of freedom for every honest person who comes afterward.

If we want fewer rules, we need more people who keep their word. If we want less supervision, we need more people who behave properly when nobody watches.

People who govern themselves require less government from everyone else. Every act of dishonesty makes freedom more expensive.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

Trump is the greatest president in history, likely sent by God. We have Elon, probably a friendly alien. America is the greatest civilization in world history. We are living at the dawn of possibly its greatest period ever. And we are going to win.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

I think Woke ideologies, including Left and Right, are philosophical codifications of patterns that characterize personality disorders, plus systems of their rationalizations, that effectively induce personality disordered behavior in people who get caught up in them.

[Carl Hindy, Ph.D. @DrCarlHindy]

Relationship Reminder:
Put down your phone when they are talking.

[Laura Sheehan @MissLRS75]

@AppyOrtho What an incredible story. Inspiring. How wonderful your children know it now! And I believe he really did tip the headsman before he was executed. It's hard to fathom that level of honor.

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

Capitalism assumes human beings are self-interested and makes them earn money by serving strangers.

Socialism puts those same self-interested human beings inside the government and gives them control over everyone else’s property.

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

The American insurance cartel is not capitalism. Single payer would not cure its concentration of power. It would complete it.

Put the money under the patient’s control.

Let physicians compete!

Publish actionable prices!

Allow entrepreneurs to enter!

Let capital build the capacity patients need.

[Megha @megha_lilly]

This quote from Oscar Wilde helps to explain why so many wealthy and privileged people love to sympathize with criminals and murderers. It gives them the feeling of forgiving a monster without ever having suffered at his hand. They are “sentimentalists” as he says.

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

Millions of Americans live inside an economic miracle they have never been taught to see.

A young socialist in New York wakes up in an apartment building someone imagined years before it existed.

Someone purchased the land. Someone navigated the financing. Architects designed it. Engineers made it stand. Construction workers built it. Electricians wired it. Plumbers made clean water appear from a faucet. Every one of them was paid before the first tenant ever paid rent.

That required capital.

He picks up a phone containing decades of accumulated science, engineering and entrepreneurship. Thousands of people across dozens of countries helped create it. Investors financed ideas that could have failed. Factories were built. Workers were trained. Competing companies made the technology faster, better and cheaper.

That required capital.

He orders coffee grown on another continent and has breakfast delivered to his apartment. Then he opens X and announces that capitalism has failed.

Capitalism has produced so much abundance that its beneficiaries mistake abundance for nature.

Every apartment, restaurant, airplane, medicine, phone, grocery store and business began as an idea in someone’s mind. Someone acted. Someone risked time, reputation, and money. Other people voluntarily joined the effort because they believed they could improve their own lives by helping build it.

Capital is not greed. Capital is accumulated human effort placed at risk to create a future that does not yet exist.

Ro Khanna is wrong about taxing unrealized wealth. A valuation is not money. An illiquid founder cannot pay taxes with a post-money valuation. Government seizure of founder equity is not free enterprise.

But the deeper problem is that we have stopped teaching Americans free enterprise.

Healthcare is not unaffordable because capitalism failed.

Healthcare is unaffordable because government replaced competition with cronyism.

Government protects hospital monopolies, restricts physician ownership, blocks new competitors, hides prices, rewards consolidation, and then proposes more government as the cure.
Government displaced competition, protected incumbents, and handed the resulting bill to patients and taxpayers.

-Rojas out