This story is insane:
• american streamer goes to south korea to do content like a lunatic
• dances on a memorial for wwii sex slaves, plays north korean propaganda on the subway, throws ramen at a store owner like a psychopath
• the country puts a BOUNTY on his location
• a former korean navy seal finds him and knocks him out cold on a live stream
• he gets arrested, charged with 8 counts including deepfake sexual violence crimes
• shows up to his first court date an hour late, hungover, in a maga hat
• calls south korea a "us vassal state" in open court
• prosecution asks for 3 years hard labor
• his mom files a petition begging the judge for leniency
• his last words before sentencing: "i haven't done anything to offend anyone during these proceedings, which shows i learned my lesson"
• judge sentences him anyway, has him handcuffed in the courtroom on the spot
• and when he finally gets deported back to america, he has to register as a sex offender
Bizarre situation brewing in LA public schools, as reported by WSJ today
Teachers and parents say schools regularly run out of cleaning supplies and toilet paper
But per-student spending rose from $11.7k to $29.3k since 2014 — about 5x the rate of inflation
Notably…. the district doubled spending on outside vendors and digital tools over that time period
The superintendent personally received "no-bid emergency authority" to close 72% of those contracts — and nearly 70% went over budget, per WSJ
(District spokesperson says increased spending is due to virtual learning, tutoring and rising costs of special ed…)
So now I’m just “claiming to be a doctor” according to @JeromeAdamsMD.
He is making an unfalsifiable sociology argument. Sweden’s approach to COVID only worked because Sweden had universal healthcare, since viruses don’t operate in a vacuum and won’t spread if you have an insurance card in your wallet.
We all know insurance doesn’t equal access to care. It doesn’t here with Medicaid, it certainly doesn’t in the UK or Canada, and it doesn’t in Sweden either. There’s nothing about having insurance that stops virus spread.
If social trust and social supports are why Sweden could stay more open, then why did multiple European countries still post worse age standardized mortality than Sweden?
And if long school closure was so obviously necessary, why were California and Florida fairly close on age standardized excess mortality despite radically different restriction profiles?
The US expanded medicaid, gave enhanced ACA subsidies, mandated paid family leave, and even gave cash stimulus checks to people. Yet after all that we still couldn’t have sent kids back to school, like Sweden did, because we aren’t a homogenous, high trust society?
😳
Another story from the land of Medicare for All.
Between 1939–1945, children in concentration and labor camps were stripped of their names - turned into numbers. (Holocaust in Color)
We will never forget.
Great comment from reader:
“Rural life in the United States is a more complex thing than the stories that people tell to feel a certain way about themselves. There are large swaths of half decayed towns that have barely managed to scratch out an existence for decades now. They would be the full-on ghost towns but for the substantial state and federal transfer payments, of which there are now a thousand different varieties.
Also, people don't scratch and claw through as competitive a process of education and credentialing as exists in the world to sit in, say, Clayton, New Mexico waiting for the few cardiac events that will statistically occur per year to the otherwise unserved population within a 90-minute drive. You literally cannot make that lifestyle worth the while of anyone but an imaginary eccentric cardiologist-cum-antelope hunter who drove hard through a couple of decades of advanced training to reach personal Nirvana at precisely the right time to sit quietly on the high plains for 90+% of his or her time waiting for that cardiac event that requires all that training, equipment, support staff and facilities. Advanced cardiology is an amazing miracle of technology and human capital that is limited by more than just cost. The vast geography of the American West doesn't have an analog in the developed world, and you can't "fix" it with funding or punditry. Some people see living that lifestyle as worth it, with full knowledge of the trade-offs. Others see any trade-off as an excuse to invoke the political hobgoblins that keep them in power. Here we are...”
R to @anish_koka: Just read the whole thing.
“In cases where the after-birth abortion were requested for non-
medical reasons, we do not suggest any threshold, as it depends on the neurological development of newborns, which is something neurologists and psychologists would be able to assess.”
R to @anish_koka: “If the death of a newborn is not wrongful to her on the grounds that she cannot have formed any aim that
she is prevented from accomplishing, then it should also be permissible to practise an after-birth abortion on a healthy newborn too, given that she has not formed any aim yet.”
R to @anish_koka: Nonetheless, to bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their
care. On these grounds, the fact that a fetus has the potential to become a person who will have an (at least)
acceptable life is no reason for prohibiting abortion.
Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.
In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice‘after-birth abortion’, rather than‘infanticide’,
R to @anish_koka: “A serious philosophical problem arises when the same conditions that would have justified abortion
become known after birth. In such cases, we need to assess facts in order to decide whether the same arguments that apply to killing a human fetus can also be consistently applied to killing a newborn human”
My god. What an absolute abomination.
The journal of Medical Ethics publishes a commentary in 2013 that attempts to morally justify the killing of a baby after birth — an afterbirth abortion. 🧵
Awesome , need more of this. It is absolutely true that empowered healthcare stakeholders keep invoking non relevant metrics to skew legislative debate on reform. What good is universal coverage if benchmark life saving metrics fall far behind?
Five teaching hospitals in Texas - including Houston Methodist - require all students to get a Covid shot in order to do rotations at their hospital.
I will write a medical exemption for any student in Texas facing this mandate - free of charge. Email frontdesk@breathemd.org.
If they deny my exemption, I will help you find a lawyer and raise money to sue them.
mRNA shots are not safe, not effective, and no one should be injecting them into their body.
65 year old with 30 pack year smoking history, quit 10 years ago, now has progressive dyspnea with mild exertion.
Evaluation suggestive of combined COPD and Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.
Normal LV/RV on echo with mild pulmonary hypertension.
R to @anish_koka: x.com/anish_koka/status/2043…
🎯 From the full post linked in reply :
“The U.S. is genuinely without peers. Every international comparison of healthcare access implicitly assumes the countries being compared are meaningfully comparable. They are not — at least not for this question. The United States is the third-largest country in the world by land area and the third most populous. No high-income democracy comes close to combining both. The United Kingdom has 68 million people in an area smaller than Oregon. The Nordic countries together have fewer people than the greater New York metropolitan area spread across a landmass that is mostly accessible by road. These countries face no meaningful analog to the American geographic access problem.
The countries that do approximate the U.S. in scale — Russia, China, India, Brazil — fail so comprehensively on PCI access that no meaningful comparison is possible. Russia has perhaps 100 PCI centers for 144 million people across 11 time zones. China’s cath lab infrastructure is heavily concentrated in coastal cities. India and Brazil have dramatic urban-rural gradients at a severity that makes rural Nevada look well-served. These are not peer comparators. They are cautionary tales about what actually happens when healthcare infrastructure is insufficient at continental scale.”
Must read, data-driven analysis of a very hard healthcare access issue in America by @anish_koka
https://open.substack.com/pub/anishkokamd/p/the-us-healthcare-system-has-basically
America Has Solved the Hardest Healthcare Access Problem Better Than Anyone Else — Here’s the Data.
A bivariate analysis of 84,000 census tracts reveals that only 2% of Americans live beyond guideline-recommended access to emergency cardiac care.
https://open.substack.com/pub/anishkokamd/p/the-us-healthcare-system-has-basically?r=6chj5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I don’t get this argument on why Sweden’s Covid response could only work in Sweden.
The virus didn’t want a 50% marginal tax rate so it stayed away?
Somehow having universal healthcare (compared to a 92% insured rate in the US) means the virus won’t spread if schools are open?
With #America250 coming up, here's a reproduction of the famous "Act for the relief of sick and disabled Seamen" signed into law by John Adams in 1798.
This law is sometimes presented as something that shows even the founders were considering universal healthcare, but it wasn’t. It was a narrow, occupation-based system funded by wage deductions for a strategically vital workforce. (Seamen were relevant to national defense at the time.) It's more like mandated mutual aid for sailors. I wouldn't call it a blueprint for modern public insurance.
Way back before LAMA-LABA , guidelines were to do LABA-ICS for COPD.
Curious how compelling evidence was to change to current paradigm of LAMA-LABA , then add ICS if needed.
Students at Swarthmore College in PA were chanting: “Iran, Iran, you make us proud! Take another soldier out! Hezbollah, you make us proud! Take another soldier out!”
🎥 @Surge_Philly
American healthcare is deeply flawed.
But we do a lot right. Our outcomes for acute conditions (heart attack, cancer, stroke, and trauma) are the best.
Nearly our entire population has rapid access to a subspecialist that can thread a catheter into an artery in the heart or brain to suck out a clot.
Read the thread below to see how extraordinary that is.
Guy just took a machete to the heads and bodies of random subway riders at Grand Central Station before NYPD officers finally shot him.
According to the @nypost, “He has 13 prior arrests, including one for menacing with a sharp object...”
https://nypost.com/2026/04/11/us-news/nyc-cops-shoot-machete-wielding-stabber-at-grand-central-station-halting-weekend-trains/
Interesting data for those Canadians who laud Canada’s universal healthcare system and fear monger about adopting “US-styled healthcare”
Where would you rather suffer a heart attack?
America is the best place to have a life threatening emergency like a heart attack. You will get the best medical science has to offer anywhere on the planet. Where the system falls short is in chronic, non-life-threatening conditions, especially the slow decline of aging, and benign symptoms that are best obseved over time. These get million dollar workups and treatments that are often unnecessary which raise costs for everyone.
I have been briefed on an incident that occurred at Grand Central Station this morning. Reports indicate a man slashed three people on the platform with a machete. Officers shot the man when he did not drop the machete. He has since been pronounced dead.
I’m grateful to the NYPD for their quick response and for preventing additional violence. The three victims were taken to the hospital and are thankfully in stable condition. The NYPD is conducting an internal investigation and will release body-worn camera footage, as it does in all incidents involving the discharge of an officer's firearm.
R to @anish_koka: Interactive maps: https://anishkoka.github.io/pci-access-maps/
Methods-Limitations-Datasources : https://anishkoka.github.io/pci-access-maps/methods.html
R to @anish_koka: This isn't just remote northern communities.
Eleven of Canada's densest census divisions — including Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke, and Nanaimo, totaling 1.3M people — exceed 90 minute prehospital time.
A STEMI patient in Trois-Rivières with universal insurance is worse off than an uninsured patient in rural Nevada within the critical 90minute threshold from Renown Regional.
R to @anish_koka: A country that achieves timely emergency cardiac access for 98% of 335 million people has not failed its citizens.
A country that gives 100% of its citizens an insurance card but leaves about a fifth of its population beyond a critical window of care has.
Insurance is not access. Data >> narrative.
R to @anish_koka: And it's not because Canada is vast. Canada's 37M people live almost entirely within 125 miles of the U.S. border. The problem isn't geography — it's infrastructure insufficiency.
41 PCI centers for 37 million people.
The U.S. has 1,248 for 335 million.
R to @anish_koka: Now Canada.
Every healthcare ranking that puts the U.S. last holds up Canada as a model. The Commonwealth Fund treats universal insurance as the primary measure of access. Canada scores well almost by definition.
But insurance coverage and geographic access to care are not the same thing.
R to @anish_koka: The comparison holds no matter how you measure it:
Estimated drive time: U.S. 2.0% beyond 90 min vs. Canada 18.8% → ~10× worse per capita
Nallamothu prehospital time: U.S. 8.4% vs. Canada 24.5% → ~3× worse per capita
This is not within the margin of methodological uncertainty. It's a large, consistent, robust disparity.
R to @anish_koka: Who are the 2%?
4.7M live at ~10 people/sq mi — deep rural. The right answer there isn't a cath lab staffed 24/7 for 10 cases a year. It's pharmacoinvasive strategy.
1.6M are the real policy target — moderate-density communities that could sustain a PCI program but don't have one yet.
108K are geographic anomalies. Hawaii. The Florida Keys. Islands and mountains.
R to @anish_koka: 2% is not a broken system. It is the irreducible geographic residual of a continental nation. No country at this scale eliminates it.
And we've spent tens of billions on Critical Access Hospitals trying to push that number lower — with essentially zero improvement since 2000. Could the resources have been better spent on rural air transport and primary care?