Catherine

Happily married Catholic grandma,artist,and gardener

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

Telling an eighty-year-old woman to "check the portal" for serious biopsy results is cruelty disguised as digital efficiency.

My 82-year-old aunt had a lung biopsy done two weeks ago.

The doctor told her they’d have the pathology report ready within five business days.

Friday afternoon rolled around. No call.
She dialed the clinic’s main desk, her voice shaking with anxiety.

The receptionist cut her off before she could finish explaining:

“Doctor doesn’t give results over the phone anymore. All lab findings are automatically released to your MyChart patient portal.”

My aunt said, “Sweetheart, I don’t have a computer. I have a landline on my kitchen wall. Can the doctor just tell me if I have cancer?”

The receptionist sighed into the receiver:
“It’s hospital network policy. We can’t bypass the portal. You’ll have to have a family member create an account and view the file.”

My aunt spent an entire seventy-two-hour weekend sitting in her recliner, gripping her reading glasses, convinced she was dying.

I drove out to her house on Monday morning, set up a profile on my laptop, and pulled up the records.

The result was benign.

The pathology report had been uploaded four days earlier.

A doctor spent three minutes clicking an upload button, and an elderly woman endured four days of sheer psychological terror because the hospital decided a phone call was too expensive.

Since when did delivering medical news become a self-service task?

[All About Nature @NAmazing44779]

But...I have nothing to say...

📹 wolf.8663143, Instagram

[Dr. Naomi Wolf. 8 NYT Bestsellers. DPhil, Poetry. @naomirwolf]

This is just a fantastic piece of prose

[Love Classical Music and Movies 🎺🎻💖🎥🎬 @AlexTran677026]

This seriously made my day

[Mark 2 @ethicalliberty]

Posted to chill us out. There are beautiful things in this world, and we need to remember that through the gloom.
Sit back for a brief moment . Sound up

[Catherine @AZCatherine]

@DTDavisPhD @MattWalshBlog SICKEST SIGHT EVER!!
Not enough to celebrate killing within the womb- now we celebrate squeezing life out of precious toddlers- by their Mother 🤦🏼‍♀️

[Catherine @AZCatherine]

@RickGarnett Way to go!!

[CONSTITUTION X 🇺🇸 @ConstitustionX]

🚨 THEY LOCKED THE PHONES AWAY… AND HISTORY EXPLODED.
For 63 years this Long Island Little League team never tasted a state title.
Then the coaches did something radical.
Five hours before every single game…
They ripped the phones out of the kids’ hands.
Dumped them in a bucket.
And threw away the distractions.
What happened next is pure fire:
The kids started talking to each other again.
They locked in.
They focused like their lives depended on it.
And they went on the greatest run in the program’s entire existence.
First New York State championship. Ever.
Regional play. ESPN cameras. History rewritten.
The assistant coach said it best:
“When the apps disappear… the real kids show up.”
The players? They love it.
They call the phone bucket their good-luck charm.
Structure works.
Discipline works.
Focus works.
Phones don’t.
This isn’t just a baseball story.
It’s a wake-up call for every parent, every coach, every school in America.
Are we raising champions…
or scrolling zombies?
Drop the phones.
Raise the standards.
Watch what happens.

[Catherine @AZCatherine]

What a great kid!!!!!

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

Apparently, the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has determined not to count letter grades toward its freshmen’s GPAs during their first semester, starting in 2027. The reason given is that this move will address the growing mental health crisis among young people. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will, in fact, exacerbate the crisis.

Across cultures, one can discern a common pattern in the initiation rituals of primal peoples. The elders of the tribe rip a young person from the comfort of his home during the night. He is then scarified or otherwise physically marked in some way—a tooth is knocked out or his face is cut—in order to impress upon him that life is difficult.

Then he is introduced to the lore and history of his people, and finally he is taken to the edge of the wilderness, given a few simple provisions, and told to make his way for an extended period of time.

The entire purpose of the exercise is to break him free from the dominance of his self-regarding feelings and to orient him to the achievement of objective goods.

Plato famously compared the soul to a horse-drawn chariot. The animals represent the passions, which provide energy for the vehicle, and the driver represents intelligence and refined moral consciousness. As long as the charioteer is in place, the chariot makes its way purposefully. But if the charioteer is kicked out, the horses will run amok.

Our “suicidally empathetic” culture, which consistently privileges feeling over objective value, has produced armies of dangerously uninitiated young people. In terms of Plato’s metaphor, it has given rise to lots and lots of chariots with no sense of direction, crashing into one another.

Electing not to count first-semester grades toward students’ GPAs in order to spare the delicate emotions of eighteen-year-olds is, spiritually speaking, about as dumb a move as a university could make.

[TONY™ @TONYxTWO]

I’ve seen enough.. boycott Coca Cola!

This is actually pretty insane

[Joel Berry @JoelWBerry]

My goodness. One of the best things I’ve ever heard. Bravo.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

Like many others, I have been alarmed by the success of certain politicians in our country who identify as extreme socialists or communists.

This is not a matter of classical liberals triumphing over standard-issue conservatives; this is the victory of people who stand athwart the fundamental principles that undergird our country.

There are many reasons why I detest Communism, but I want to draw attention to just one issue of supreme importance.

Karl Marx said that the first critique is the critique of religion. He meant that, before a complete re-working of the politics and economics of a society can take place, religion has to be taken down.

This is because religion, as he saw it, is the “opium of the masses,” a drug taken to dull our sensitivity to the suffering caused by economic exploitation. As long as the suffering populace is lured into complacency by fantasies about God's providence and the promise of eternal life, they will never rise up and throw off their chains.

But there is a second reason why the elimination of religion is of paramount significance for Marx.

Communism aspires to be a totalizing system, involving the government's control over education, entertainment, communication, politics, and especially economics.

What stands resolutely athwart this ambition is religion, which declares that all of these societal expressions are finally under the judgment of God. So, if you want Communism to succeed, religion has to be stamped out.

If you doubt me on any of this, I would encourage you to read the recent histories of China, Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Venezuela. Revisit those histories and tell me I'm wrong about the attack on religion.

Might I encourage my fellow believers in God not to be complacent in the face of this very troubling development in the American body politic?

[Momo_🎱 @momo_sow0]

On a trop banalisé que Ronaldo a sauté si haut que ses genoux ont atteint le niveau de la tête de son adversaire.🤯

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

In 1884, Ulysses S. Grant was dying of throat cancer and was dead broke.

His money was wiped out by a swindler who stole his fortune.

Desperate to leave something for his wife, he agreed to write his Civil War memoirs and was close to signing a contract for a meager 10% royalty.

Mark Twain stepped in, called the deal robbery and offered Grant 70% of the profits through his own publishing company.

Grant raced death to finish the book, completing it just days before he died in July 1885.

It became one of the greatest memoirs ever written.

The royalties left his widow nearly half a million dollars, about $16 million today, and the book has never gone out of print.

[Helene Meisler @Chartfest1]

This is Helene Meisler

You might have noticed my account was hacked by some crypto spammer. Getting it back seems unlikely.

You can now find me over on Bluesky at hmeisler.

If you could could RT this so that the word gets out that Dune is not me, I would really appreciate it

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Congressman Brandon Gill @RepBrandonGill]

Today I asked an abortion advocate what her favorite method of abortion is.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Mark Cuban just described the largest wealth transfer of the AI era.

Almost nobody understood what he said.

Cuban: “There are 33 million companies in this country. Aren’t going to have AI budgets. Aren’t going to have AI experts.”

Not tech startups.

The shoe store. The regional trucking outfit. The accounting firm with 12 employees.

The businesses that actually run the physical economy.

They know AI is coming. They have no idea what to do with it.

Cuban: “You’ve got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization.”

Software is dead.

The SaaS era ran on one rule. Build a generic product. Force millions of companies to bend their workflows around it. Charge rent forever.

AI ends the contract.

The business stops bending to the software. The intelligence bends to the business.

But customized by whom.

The third-generation manufacturer cannot tell Claude from Gemini. The county hospital is staring at a reactor asking where the light switch is.

Cuban: “Who’s going to do it for them?”

That question is worth more than the frontier models themselves.

Hundreds of billions are being burned to build the foundation. The smartest engineers alive are locked in a bloodbath over who owns the base layer.

Let them fight.

Let them burn the capital. Let them drive the cost of raw intelligence toward zero.

Because the wealth does not collect where the brain is built.

It collects where the brain meets the business.

Every ambitious kid in college right now thinks survival means a seat at OpenAI or Anthropic.

Cuban is staring at the other 99 percent of the economy.

Learn the models. Then learn the messy, unglamorous reality of how a 50-person company actually operates.

Walk through the door. Understand their problems. Wire the intelligence directly into their revenue.

That is not a job title. That is an entire economic class being born.

You do not need to build the brain. You need to build the nervous system.

The biggest winners of the electricity era were not the engineers who built the generators. They were the ones who walked into dark factories and showed the owners where to plug in.

33 million companies are standing in the dark right now.

Silicon Valley is racing to build the god. The fortunes will belong to whoever teaches him a trade.