Pamela

@CNN_NewsNight @CornelWest $1.8B / 42 million black descendants of slaves = $43 in reparations I repeat, FORTY-THREE DOLLARS each.

Cornel West: DOJ's $1.8B fund should pay reparations for slavery @CornelWest

@saitoyui14 @IMPERATORAUS Applies to all appearance under one's control - clothes, grooming, weight, posture.

"It's bad that you have no fashion sense." Dumbass: You look ugly bro Midwit: My appearance has no bearing on my ability. Genius: Your lack of fashion suggests someone pathologically incapable of noticing the most obvious things about humans, someone with no respect for shared social context, and someone who cannot bring order to even the simplest and most obvious part of their life.

Sometimes we spend years studying a particular topic or idea only to discover that our initial – albeit simple – position was right all along. Give me your best example of where the low IQ take is actually the high IQ take.

@brooklynvegan So much non-punk on that top 20.

Rolling Stone's Top 100 Punk Albums of All Time brooklynvegan.com/rolling-stones…

@chiky_handlr Doesn't even quote the east coast.

Zohran Mamdani quoted Tupac Shakur when asked if he opposes the war in Iran: "This war killed thousands of civilians, so yes, I strongly oppose it— Tupac said it decades ago, we always seem to have money for war but never to feed the poor."

@jarvis_best Kansas exists.

Compromise: put the data centers in a state with no natural beauty at all, such as Utah.

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.

As we get closer to Mother’s Day, it’s time again for a shout out to the all the moms, courtesy of Mr. T.

Thank you for TCM, Ted Turner. Turner Classic Movies means so much to me. RIP

@dominos This is a cracker, not a hand-tossed pizza.

@HarmeetKDhillon Let this be a daily post! Thanks from Denver.

Just sued Denver. How’s your day going?

If data centers are so good, why don't Big Tech executives put them into their own neighborhoods.

@MattWalshBlog Not included.....................................................included

This is an atrocious joke of a list for a bunch of reason, starting with the fact that it almost completely leaves out modern American folk and Americana, vibrant and eclectic genres where most of the best songwriting has always been done and is still being done

@WallStreetApes People > Fish

Denver Water is draining Antero Reservoir, 2,300+ acre trophy trout fishery in Colorado Due to the drought, they plan on draining the reservoir. It is stocked with millions of fish that will die There encouraging people to go fish before they’re all killed, starting May 1 is when the draining begins CPW has stocked 5.4 million fish into Antero since 2020 alone. Primarily rainbow trout, brown trout, cutthroat variants, cutbows, brook trout, and others. This doesn’t include natural reproduction or fish already present before 2020 All these fish will die

@Timcast I remember the "data" that categorized George Floyd protesters in Denver who defaced the Cathedral as "right wing." The data is BS.

These demons hired fucking nazis to show up to conservative rallies so they could fake stats like this Yall campaign with Hasan We see you

Starting to think that the party funding the KKK and trying to kill presidents probably aren’t the good guys.

@bford2 @DenverChannel What a loser.

@DenverChannel I avoid churches at all costs. Like avoiding rattlesnakes and door-to-door salesman and nuclear waste.

For the first time in 25 years, a new Gallup poll shows young men in the U.S. are more religious than young women, with much of the growth happening among young Republicans. denver7.com/news/local-new…

@DenverChannel Hope for the future.

@TIME What if we told women's stories, not stories of women in a male framework? Actually disrupt the devaluing of "women's work."

We need more women’s stories on screen, Zoe Saldaña said on the TIME100 Gala red carpet. “Tell more stories of women who were pioneers. Tell more stories of women who were trailblazers in science and medicine and technology and art.” Zoe Saldaña is on the 2026 TIME100. You can read our interview with her here: time.com/article/2026/0…

@CityofDenver What a waste of $200,000.

Ready to make a difference in your neighborhood? Denver is investing $200,000 in community-led climate action projects. denvergov.org/resilientneigh…