Dona Deman

Nobody normal is going to believe or accept that they were born responsible for all the sins of the world in all of its history. Nobody.

@DrSuneelDhand Somehow our food production and delivery ended up in the hands of the wrong people. This could happen in Europe too.

I love America, but I hate to burst your bubble: if you are on Twitter, and you are getting posts about how Europeans visiting for the World Cup are completely in awe of American food and grocery stores— I have to be honest with you and tell you you are being fed complete nonsense by the algorithm. I’ve traveled to almost every European country, and there isn’t a single one which doesn’t have better grocery stores and higher-quality restaurant food than the USA. Just being honest, as a doctor should

@jaynitx All of these examples ignored the middle. You don’t need a high IQ to understand that you shouldn’t ignore the middle, because you need the middle more than the middle needs you.

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years. Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered: Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures. Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing. He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success: The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren. He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above. His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics. He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades. The results split into three groups: The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives. And the bottom group? By any measure, failures. The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic. It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families. Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity. There's a concept called "capitalization rate." It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing? In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college. If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else. Here's something stranger. Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team: January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th... 11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March. This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too. Why? The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st. When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated. So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games. We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest. Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best. Self-fulfilling prophecy. The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero. We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar. Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college. 11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity. Now here's the part about math. Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing. Some people say it's genetic. It's not. It's attitudinal. When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it. When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't. Here's the proof. The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes. It's so long most kids don't finish it. A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed. Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance. The correlation was 0.98. In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high. If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time. If they can do it, they're good at math. Why do Asian cultures have this attitude? Gladwell's theory: rice farming. His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays. A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year. Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work. There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry." His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry." If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup. When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly. Now consider distance running. In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day. In the United States, that number is probably 5,000. Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%. Kenya's is probably 95%. The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention. Here's the most fascinating finding. 30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability. Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email. This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability. How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood? You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead. 80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs. By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership. Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle. They say it's the reason they succeeded. A disadvantage that became an advantage. Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand: When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability. We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become. We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table. We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair. The capitalization argument is liberating. It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation. It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out. If we choose to pay attention.

@VaticanNews @ArnoldSCI If something important costs THAT much, doing it depends on the willingness of EVERYBODY to change their lives in order to pay for it, not just the few capitalists who might lose profits. So nothing will work unless the common good takes precedence over the common status quo.

In a video message for the Tenth Austrian World Summit, Pope Leo XIV highlights how "the progress at COP30 can be followed up" with a transition to societies "where the common good takes precedence over profit". @ArnoldSCI vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2…

@nxt888 You poor dear. It’s not what passport you have that matters. It’s whether you have money.

The American passport is not just a travel document. It is a psychological artifact. A laminated proof of belonging to the "winning team." A small blue book that, when you hold it in a foreign country, does something to your posture, your assumptions, your baseline expectation of how you will be treated and what you are owed. Most Americans have never interrogated that feeling. They experience it as "natural." As if confidence in your own welcome everywhere on earth is a personality trait and not a political arrangement maintained by carrier groups and reserve currency status and the memory of what happens to countries that seriously inconvenience Washington. The passport feels like freedom. It is freedom: real, functional, enviable freedom. Built on a foundation that the passport holder almost never has to look at. That is precisely what makes it so effective.

@AbdulElSayedHQ Does Mr. DePaoli really think that the UAW could successfully negotiate on health care with the government? You can’t strike the government. Most of your taxes are already withheld. And it would take a lot of resources to convince other demographics to agree with your complaints.

UAW says Abdul’s position on Medicare for All helped him win their endorsement. "We, as a union, waste so many resources when we're in negotiation on health care," DePaoli said. "Why not a health care specialist in the U.S. Senate?" detroitnews.com/story/news/pol…

@poperespecter1 The US Church has exerted a lot of pressure behind the scenes on politicians and businesses. It has been neither kind nor fair for the people the Church didn’t favor. We will see what happens now.

@DonaDeman The US Church has no authority over immigration policy. Instead their role has simply been to be kind to people who are here. At no time did they say the border should be wide open.

Pope Leo's views on immigration should be completely non-controversial. He says he is against open borders. Countries have a right to decide who enters. Mass immigration is a problem to be solved. People should stay in their own countries. But that if people do come, they should be treated like human beings with dignity. He also says if they come, they should learn the language and respect the laws. But because people's brains are broken by American politics they cannot understand this nuance.

@Pontifex The Catholic Church should fund and implement an example program in Italy (at no cost to Italians.) It should take care of each client immigrant for at least 5 years and help them become self sufficient without any discriminating against the natives. Then show us the accounting.

Today in the Church, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For Christians, Jesus’ Heart symbolizes God’s merciful and infinite love for every human being. No matter where we come from, God’s love knows no borders, makes no distinctions, is given to all, and brings us together in unity. #ApostolicJourney

@RepJayapal The American Dream was out of reach for multiple generations (that kept getting smaller) of non-immigrants, while it was right there for you. Figure out how that happened or forget about anybody’s future. The chickens have come home to roost.

In the Nation’s edition, recognizing America’s 250th anniversary, I wrote about how the American Dream that I have lived is out of reach for immigrants today. Read the full piece on my immigration story: thenation.com/article/societ…

@ElissaSlotkin We already have Obamacare and Medicaid. Why aren’t people happy with them? Fix them or shut up. Maybe the real problem is inefficiency, incompetence, and criminality in health care delivery. Maybe it’s unrealistic expectations about what modern life costs. Fix what’s wrong.

A national insurance option, for anyone at any age, would give millions of Americans the opportunity to be able to go to the doctor without going bankrupt. It's as simple as that.

@MalloryMcMorrow I hate you for misleading the unsophisticated. You MAKE me hate! The HONEST context is that the money raised by the IPO is going to be spent on building SpaceX. If that fails, the stock price goes waaaay down. Musk can’t spend it on himself and we can’t spend it on ourselves.

To put this into context, a trillion dollars could pay for the budget for the entire state of Michigan, a state of 10 million people, for all of the schools, roads, healthcare services, veterans services, public safety, state parks, universities and everything else…for over 12 years. Musk wouldn’t have become a success without us - paying for the government subsidies, incentives, and contracts his companies rely on.

@MarcoFoster_ @neiltyson We support international students and there is a special internship program for them. We don’t support our own talent like that. Most published research papers are too flawed to use. Why throw more dollars away? Know a fix?

“It’s time to wake the fuck up” Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Half of my fellow graduate students when I was getting my PhD were foreign nationals. Do you realize one third of all the Nobel Prizes in sciences won by Americans were won by immigrants to America? If you’re gonna trail the world in practically everything, including your economy, it’s time to wake the fuck up”

@Pontifex I remember being taught that God threw us out of the Garden of Eden. And now, we have to take care of ourselves. Was/is that lesson only for some?

Every human being is worthy by the mere fact of having been willed, created, and loved by God. There is no situation that causes the Lord to turn His gaze away from us. It is a consoling truth that accompanies us at all times and reminds us that His merciful love always outweighs whatever good or evil we may have done. #ApostolicJourney vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

@AbdulElSayed Stop being a pied piper, you jerk! Goods and services are mostly labor. The wealth of the rich CANNOT be liquidated into labor. Labor comes from the rest of us and it doesn’t increase if the rich are taxed, soaked, sent to Gulags, or anything else. Stop planning to screw workers.

If you tax a billionaire 8%, you know what they still are? Still a billionaire. Their kids' kids' kids' kids are gonna be rich. Maybe they could pay a little bit more so that all of our kids can go to good schools and travel functional roads and get good healthcare.

@RepRobertGarcia Do some actual fact finding. Ask people like Bill Gates whether they know or knew about any underworld connections on the part of Epstein.

Our Epstein investigation is still ongoing. This week, we're talking to Lesley Groff and Bill Gates. And we are going to keep talking to anyone with information about Epstein's crimes and those who were in his orbit. The survivors deserve justice.

@Pontifex Why not just say that we are all equal? The biggest global conflicts are over real estate, resources, and what economic systems do best at FAIRLY producing and providing goods and services. Bring in people whose history or “dignity” justifies being net takers and it explodes.

Every truly just society is built upon the recognition of the inviolable dignity of the human person. Such dignity precedes any concession by the State and cannot be subordinated to shifting social consensus. It belongs to every human being by the very fact of their existence, and for this reason, it must guide every positive legal system. When this conviction remains alive, the law becomes a safeguard for all and a guarantee against the imposition of particular interests and agendas. #ApostolicJourney vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

@ElissaSlotkin You have nothing to fear but your own speech. Trump has done nothing to you, but your own stupid questionable video has really lowered expectations of you.

Trump threatened to have me hanged over a 90-second video I made. I'm a sitting United States Senator and spent decades serving this country, and it didn't matter. Keeping your head down will not keep you safe. Staying quiet will not keep you safe.

@nytimes A prior video shows Renee Good turning right with the officer BETWEEN the right front of her car and the ICE van. He runs out in front and to the left of her car. She had started driving without looking where she was going, after being told that she could no longer leave.

In an exclusive interview, Scott Pelley spoke about being fired from “60 Minutes,” and why he thinks Bari Weiss should leave her job as the CBS News editor in chief. He also responded to President Trump’s comments. Watch, read or listen to “The Interview.” nyti.ms/4eqSjzk

@MalloryMcMorrow Ross Perot had made the budget deficit an issue that couldn’t be avoided. He ran for President and got enough votes to make both parties listen.

Who was in charge the last time the United States eliminated the budget deficit? Bill Clinton. For all the bluster about fiscal responsibility and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse - Trump and Republicans blew the deficit hole even larger, giving billionaires another tax cut while threatening to cut social security. Lift the cap. Make everyone pay their fair share. And ensure the benefit we ALL pay into is available for all of us when we retire.

@UAW @AbdulElSayed So he says that YOU can keep your union health insurance. Will the Medicare Trust Fund be there when you retire, or will you all go on Medicaid For All? Have you asked? And where does El Sayed get his campaign money? If it’s too good to be true…

The UAW is proud to endorse @AbdulElSayed for U.S. Senate. UAW members in Michigan want a fighter in Washington, D.C. who isn’t afraid to push forward a strong working-class agenda with moral clarity. Having never taken a dime from corporate PACs, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is someone we can trust to have our backs, including when we need it most – like come May Day 2028. From Medicare for All to banning stock buybacks, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is ready, eager, and well-equipped to move our core issues in the U.S. Senate.