I read and I know things 🇺🇸🚀🌈🌊❤️☮️

What are 5 topics you can talk about unprepared for 5 minutes? 1-Science fiction / fantasy 2-Software design 3-Politics (social progressive & fiscal conservative), especially economics ("saltwater") 4-Medicine (thyroid cancer survivor) 5-Life, the Universe, Everything (polymath)

.@BishopSeitz in new Pastoral Letter: “To those of you affected by hatred and discrimination and afraid of what comes next, know that the church stands with you. As your Bishop, I carry your pain daily in my heart and in my prayers. I stand with you. Our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV , told me personally to stand in solidarity with suffering migrant families and not to remain silent. I will do everything I can to uphold the God-given dignity of every person in our borderlands community.”

Insane that my wife got fired because this loser thought that her job was too “DEI”. Her job, btw, at USAID was determining if companies we traded with overseas were using slave labor or abusing workers.

I have taken a good number of these calls. You definitely hear “I don’t want to die for Israel” but refusal to fight triggered by the girls’ school massacre is a much more frequent refrain. The anti-war movement can & must appeal to the morality of service members in this moment

Absolute bombshell. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense exposes how Pete Hegseth removed human oversight from AI targeting systems leading directly to the bombing of a girls school. He calls Hegseth a war criminal operating with the morality of Genghis Khan.

@cwebbonline We’re not going back!

The parish I grew up in had Franciscan monks and Sisters of St. Agnes.

The #GospelOfTheDay (Jn 9:1-41) narrates the healing of a man blind from birth. We too are healed by the love of Christ and are called to live our faith with “open eyes.”

Miller's argument is that because the world can board a plane, birthright citizenship now steals something from Americans already here. Follow that logic back far enough and you get to the question the Fourteenth Amendment was written to settle once and for all: who counts? The amendment's authors had an answer. Not blood. Not ancestry. Not the passport of the parent who carried you. Soil. Because they had just watched 600,000 Americans die over the alternative and they were not interested in leaving it ambiguous. Every nativist wave in American history said the same thing Miller is saying now, just about different people. The Irish. The Italians. The Chinese. The Jews. Each time the republic eventually remembered what it was built to be. Big enough. Open enough. Confident enough in its own idea that it did not need to check bloodlines at the door. The amendment does not steal the birthright. It is the birthright. Written in the plain English of people who earned the right to write it.

Pope Leo: “For two weeks the peoples of the Middle East have suffered the atrocious violence of war, thousands of innocent people have been killed and many more forced to abandon their homes, I renew my closeness to all those who have lost their loved ones.”

Scientists put kids through 100 hours of reading, then scanned their brains. New wiring had physically grown inside the language regions. Communication between brain areas sped up by a factor of 10. Kids who didn't read showed zero change. That was a 2009 Carnegie Mellon study. It gets wilder. In 2013, Emory University scanned 19 students every morning for 19 straight days while they read one novel chapter each night. Mornings after reading, the brain areas responsible for understanding other people's emotions lit up with new connections. So did the region that processes physical sensation. Their brains were simulating what the characters felt, as if it were happening to them. Those changes stuck around for 5 days after they finished the book. Now flip to scrolling. A massive review published in Psychological Bulletin last September pulled together 71 studies covering 98,299 people. Heavy short-form video use (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) showed a clear pattern: worse attention, weaker self-control, and more anxiety. Consistent across teenagers and adults, across every platform tested. Oxford didn't name "brain rot" its 2024 Word of the Year for nothing. A 2024 brain wave study found that people hooked on short-form video had weaker activity in the front of the brain, the part that controls focus and impulse control. Separate brain scans showed the same thing: heavy scrollers had less activation in the exact regions that deep reading strengthens. UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has been studying this for decades. Humans were never born to read. There's no gene for it. Reading is something we invented, and it hijacked neurons that were originally meant for recognizing faces. Over time, it built entirely new brain circuits connecting language, vision, and emotion. But those circuits only survive if you use them. Stop reading, and they fade. Wolf's conclusion is simple: screens built for speed produce a speed-wired brain. Books built for depth produce a depth-wired brain. One honest caveat: most of these studies are snapshots, not long-term tracking. People who already struggle to focus might just prefer short videos. But the same pattern showing up across nearly 100,000 people is hard to shrug off. The tweet repeats the line seven times. The research backs it up with brain scans, EEG data, and white-matter imaging across tens of thousands of people.

Happy Pi(e) Day! I'm hoping to make a coconut buttermilk pie today. (It's hard being a thyroid cancer survivor and dealing with constant fatigue and brain fog.)

Those who rightly criticize attacks against Jews and then say Muslims don’t belong in America make fools of themselves. Patriots understand that our Bill of Rights protect people of all faiths. To say otherwise is un-American.

🚨BREAKING: ICE agents knocked down the door of a family home looking for a man who wasn’t inside… then illegally took the people from the house. This happened in South Burlington, Vermont, where agents say a man fled from them earlier in a car, and ran into a nearby house. They then surrounded the home, and flooded the neighborhood with federal agents, while hundreds of activists gathered outside trying to stop the illegal raid. Hours later, a federal judge issued a search warrant. Agents then pulled protesters away from the entrance and knocked the door down to force their way inside the house. And the man they claimed justified the entire raid… wasn’t even there. But, they took the people in the home anyway. So, just to clarify… Federal agents stormed a home, dragged people out of the house, and detained them… even though they are not the person named in the warrant… and authorities still have not even publicly identified who those people are, or what charges they supposedly face. Neighbors say the house belonged to a family with children, and at one point, a child had to be escorted out while armed federal agents prepared to storm the home. Then, when agents tried to leave, they fired flash-bang grenades and tear gas, into a residential neighborhood, to clear the crowd. Even officials in South Burlington, Vermont questioned ICE’s tactics afterward, because operations like this don’t just terrorize families… they push the limits of what federal agents are legally allowed to do inside people’s homes. And once they start dragging the wrong people out of those homes… That’s when raids have no real limits, and the government has unlimited power.

Bush on why he quit golf during the war: “I didn’t want some mom whose son may have died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best I can. And I think playing golf during a war sends the wrong signal.” Senile Satan: 👇

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Good Wednesday #11Mar Trump claims he's the great "deal maker" but hasn't negotiated shIt: Mexico paying for his wall, end Ukraine war, Iran nuke deal, trade deals instead of tariffs, etc. Trump started WW3 b/c he has no negotiating skills.

#11Mar Good Wednesday Trump lied about the Texas refinery. That was Biden. In addition to that, Trump also lied and took credit for Biden's retirement accounts. Trump claims Biden is a loser - then takes credit for Biden's wins. Trump is still a thief.