Jim Getzen

@ChGefaell Your question could be shortened to this: “Could someone explain why there is so much alarmism?” With the drive for views, clicks, and likes, and motivated in some cases by political or social agendas, it’s an alarmism free for all out there.

Could someone explain why there is so much alarmism surrounding El Niño in 2026? Because to the untrained eye, it doesn't seem that different from those in 1982, 1997, 2015, and 2023.

Underrated life advice: Make yourself easy to root for. Be kind. Be reliable. Celebrate other people’s wins. Work hard without complaining. Carry good energy into rooms. You'll be shocked by how many doors open for you by making life better for others.

I’ve come to learn that most on social media are good. Kind. Thoughtful. Appreciative of those working hard to create things and put themselves out there. Most of all, they’re silent. Here’s to you, the silent majority.

You know those junk emails that have "PAYMENT DECLINED" in the subject line? I love those. You're telling me for once I didn't pay for something? Finally, good news!

@cedrichohnstadt Some might not appreciate your dad joke, but I'll go to the mat for you.

I can’t resist the Dad joke: Went shopping today because we have worn out our welcome.

@cmadmax @SarahLongwell25 Did you read my post a couple of layers up? I said I don't like Trump and can't wait for him to be gone. Thanks for the dog comment. Joe was wonderful.

@JimGetzen @SarahLongwell25 And how’s those grocery prices? How’s the job creation? Housing construction? Apt rentals? Auto repo? Gas prices? Medical bills? Fraud corruption from the WH? Great? Btw cute dog. Have a nice Sunday.

He’s right. The Republican Party isn’t a party of ideas. Or policy. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just a bunch of people being blindly loyal to corrupt madman who controls the primary voting base, but is unpopular with the rest of the country.

@cmadmax @SarahLongwell25 Examples: closing the border; deportation of violent illegal aliens; battling Medicaid fraud.

@JimGetzen @SarahLongwell25 Curious, which policies would they be?

I read everywhere about the 'hard right' This the term used to describe people who are Islamosceptic - that is, people who are doubtful about the merits of a religion that demands child marriage, the beating of women, and death to all who oppose it Perhaps 'sensible right' would be a better description

@stanfordNYC As a life-long Republican and conservative, I'm horrified by the damage Trump is doing to both the party and the philosophy. Sure, there are achievements here and there (eg, closing the borders), but we would have been so much better off with DeSantis as President.

It is honestly impressive that Trump has managed to a) violate ~every norm and precedent of American government while b) achieving almost zero actual gains in conservative objectives. The former is bad enough, but you'd expect it to at least avert the latter.

I am all for standing by Taiwan for as long as possible, but the hard reality is that if China really wants to take over Taiwan, we can't/won't stop it. So, it only makes sense to build chip-making capacity elsewhere. That doesn't mean everything will be "fixed" or "fine," but it will reduce the sizable economic risk and pain.

This is a great example of widget guy thinking once the widget problem is fixed, everything will be fixed. Never mind the democracy erasure, let’s send him to Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, & Sydney to tell our allies that betraying Taiwan will be fine once we can make our own chips.

Funny bit and true, but Looney Tunes is still so, so good.

@wonderofscience That's pretty well designed, tbh.

Tortoise shells have nerve endings and are sensitive to the slightest touch. This tortoise at Badger Run Wildlife Rehab loves to feel her shell scratched, so a kind volunteer made her a scratching device. 📽: Badger Run Wild Rehab / Caters News

@AJKayWriter Yes.

The gulf between what I expected from this administration and what has happened is vast … and incredibly depressing. ‘Nominally better than abjectly destructive’ is a bar I’m no longer willing to celebrate and I’ve lost all respect for the those willing to go along in the interest of self-preservation/self-promotion. MAHA, my ass.

The earth is greening. Satellite records show global leaf area has increased by more than 18% in just four decades. The biggest gains are in China and India, and also across North America. CO2 fertilization is a major driver. Carbon dioxide is plant food and one of the basic inputs for life. Plants use CO2 to grow. More CO2 means stronger growth. That is why commercial greenhouses raise CO2 levels to 1,500 parts per million - because it boosts yields. Global crop yields have risen exponentially since 1960. Famine deaths have collapsed even as the world population doubled. That is the part the doom narrative skips. The gas they call an "emergency" is helping feed the biosphere. The planet is greener.

@ihtesham2005 Okay, but why did people and animals evolve to sleep at all? It seems very disadvantageous from a survival standpoint (being defenseless while sleeping).

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it. The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body. His name is David Eagleman. He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams. Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since. Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual. You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open. Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves. This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed. In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first. Now sit with the implication of that for a second. Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years. If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight. But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep. Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense. Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal. They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise. The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied. The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you. Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops. So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly. Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation. A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium. And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case. Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep. Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it. For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all. They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking. The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream. You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen. Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

@buitengebieden That wide-open, joyful running! Super wholesome.

Best welcome home.. 😊

@GitaGopinath In China? What did you expect?

A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.

WATCH: CBS's Tony Dokoupil completes his editorial to close out the West Coast Evening News broadcast. In a minute and a half, he runs through what the other nightlies omit- that China is going through the suck worse than the U.S. right now. The media hall monitors will surely throw a fit about it tomorrow. TONY DOKOUPIL: Finally, tonight from Taiwan: as President Trump and China's Xi Jinping prepare to meet, you will hear a lot about American decline and the rise of a powerful new China. The Chinese certainly believe it. But is it true? Xi’s China is a marvel by many measures, is- is the world's second largest economy, producing almost 30% of the world's manufactured goods. They have high speed rails that put the Acela to shame. And China has lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty, making things like the iPhones in your pocket and mine. And yet, America remains the innovation hub of the world. Made in China, yes; but designed and invented in the U.S.A. New drugs, new discoveries, new inventions, new space missions. Xi boasts of the country's industrial might, and it's impossible to deny that fact. China's population is in decline, though, well below replacement rates. Unemployment is high with millions in rural provinces living in poverty, and massive housing complexes that now sit empty. Most importantly, and perhaps I'm stating the obvious here, none of these problems are a topic on the Chinese evening news. In fact, pessimism itself is forbidden on the Chinese internet. The freedoms we have, they simply do not. That's another day in America and the world. I'm Tony Dokoupil, live from Taipei, Taiwan. Good night.

I sure hope so. Go outside, go analog, go talk with people, go read a real book, go exercise, go wonder about the universe.