Barbara Dew Rupert

Lifelong Oklahoman. Still happily married, mom of 3 sons, hostmom of 10 exchange students. #ProtectDREAMers BOOMER SOONER!!!

[David Frum @davidfrum]

.@aravosis makes excellent point that Trump's accusations of sabotage undermine the government's (and the taxpayer's) potential legal remedies vs. the contractor who did a bad job on a no-bid basis. One more favor to a Trump crony.

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

🚨🚨🚨

Pulte begins a purge of the intelligence community. Add it to what Hegseth is doing w/ the military, Blanche w/ Justice, Patel w/ FBI, and hirings at ICE, and we’re entering a very dangerous period, one that makes Watergate look like child’s play.
https://t.co/T0MxVKYyLb

[James Henry @Jameshenry1970]

As a DC9 union painter with 30+ years in coatings, I’m looking at the failure not a conspiracy theory.
When a coating is lifting off in large sheets like this, that points to an adhesion failure: improper surface preparation, contamination left behind, the wrong coating system, poor recoat timing, or water introduced before the system fully cured.

A quality two-part epoxy system can perform well but the product is only as good as the prep and application. The substrate has to be properly profiled/cleaned, the specified primer or first coat applied correctly, recoat windows followed, and the full system allowed to cure before being put back into service.

That is not “vandals.” That is a coating failure that deserves a real independent inspection and an explanation of exactly what system was specified and how it was applied.

#Coatings #Epoxy #SurfacePreparation #PaintFailure #UnionPainter #QualityControl #Accountability #ReflectingPool
#Properpreperation #Elonmusk
#DonaldTrump #Donaldtrumpjr
@krassenstein @EdKrassen @eddsmitty @LucasSa56947288 @adammocklerr @harryjsisson @acnewsitics @Acyn @Bakari_Sellers

[Barbara Dew Rupert @bdew]

@Mimiiben1 5

[NWS Norman @NWSNorman]

12:50 am - If you're in central Oklahoma (Chickasha, OKC, Norman, Purcell, Shawnee, etc), a destructive line of storms is approaching.

If you need to leave a mobile home before storms arrive, or secure loose livestock/property: do it now. Don't wait.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Republicans looked the country in the eye and made a promise. When they rewrote the food stamp program last year, they said children would not be touched.

Pregnant women would not be touched.

Families with young kids would not be touched. They said it on the House floor, on the record, in front of everyone.

A year later we know the truth.

More than 776,000 children have been cut off from food assistance. In the states that track participation by age, kids make up nearly half of everyone who lost benefits.

These are kids who went to bed hungry because a politician wanted a talking point. 

We must be a country that feeds its children. We used to believe that was the bare minimum. Take care of the kid who is hungry through no fault of their own.

The people who broke that promise should have to answer for it, and in November they will.
https://t.co/yZK7shO05q

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.   

Trump’s DOJ just shut down a federal investigation into a coal company owned by Sen. Jim Justice, one of his closest allies, after it racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations for dumping dangerous chemicals into our waterways. A veteran federal prosecutor with 24 years on the job said he had never seen anything like it.  

The man who killed the case was Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer and current Acting Attorney General. This is the same guy who just gave Trump, his family, and his companies permanent immunity from IRS audits. Now Trump wants the Senate to make Blanche’s appointment permanent too.  

Equal justice under law was never supposed to come with exceptions for the President’s friends.  

The pattern isn’t subtle: protect Trump’s friends, prosecute his critics, and get rewarded with more power. That is corruption, plain and simple. Todd Blanche must not be confirmed.
https://t.co/95K8zIySPz

[Walter Masterson @waltermasterson]

Name a better take than this on the Iran war, I’ll wait.

[Barbara Dew Rupert @bdew]

@WhosYourMomo @scott73187192 @MattMaasdam You voted for him?

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

Turkey v Paraguay is the World Cup’s only group-stage match where both countries saw a major landmark disappear under a hydroelectric reservoir.

Turkey lost the ancient city of Hasankeyf to the Ilısu Dam. Paraguay’s border lost Guaíra/Sete Quedas Falls to the Itaipu reservoir.

Stay tuned for more cutting-edge, geography-based World Cup analysis.

NOTE: If you think you can do better than this one, please leave a comment! This one nearly killed me.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[Jake Tapper 🦅 @jaketapper]

NYT: A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas weeks after Defense Secretary Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense officials said.

https://t.co/fFIt8Mhyzg

[NoelCaslerComedy @caslernoel]

Dear younger voters who went for Trump in ‘24, watch the speeches of Prez & Michelle Obama & Mamdani today then compare it to Trump speaking at the White House this afternoon. Ask yourself what kinda world you wanna live in & what real leadership looks like. Then get involved.

[Harry Litman @harrylitman]

"Stephen Miller, a man with no legal training, blithely tried to sell Trump on suspending the most basic safeguard of human liberty that Anglo-American law has ever produced." https://t.co/XD6fMiiK7F

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water.

Equipment taxpayers already bought and paid for, removed right as record temperatures and a possible collapse of Atlantic currents have scientists alarmed. There is no savings analysis. The gear is already paid for. And the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea, destroying the only tools that could measure the damage.

They are smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.

[Mal @UtdMaI]

Last night in Boston, Aymen Hussein scored for Iraq;

At 12, his father was killed by Al-Qaeda.
At 18, his brother was kidnapped by ISIS

At 20, he helped Iraq qualify for the Olympics.
At 30, his decisive goal sent Iraq to their first World Cup in 40 years.

He was detained for seven hours at O’Hare International Airport and nearly denied entry into the United States.

In his very first World Cup match, he scored against Norway.

Some stories are bigger than football!

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

People here claim I advised U.S. generals poorly. (I never advised them at all.) But never in my career in national defense did the United States ever lose a war to one of our worst enemies in just four months and then completely capitulate on every major issue.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

My friend Jamie Raskin is one of the most careful and principled people in Congress. So when he says the director of the FBI may be running a taxpayer funded slush fund, I pay attention.

Here is what he found.

Kash Patel directed more than $1 million in bonus payments to a small circle of agents in his inner circle and on his security detail.

Some were getting nearly $8,000 every two weeks on top of salaries that were already maxed out at the federal ceiling. A number of them collected close to $40,000 over consecutive pay periods.

The payments came so fast that the FBI’s bonus reserve accounts ran dry and some checks bounced.

So who got the money?

Agents on Patel’s so-called "director’s advisory team."

That is the unit created in 2025 and described internally as a payback squad, built to dig up dirt on the law enforcement officials who investigated Trump and his allies.

Raskin has given Patel until June 29 to account for every payment, every recipient, and any internal review of whether this was even legal.

Patel should answer for all of it.
https://t.co/HZPeRJ2Kqg

[Jonathan Reiner @JReinerMD]

The $60 million being spent on the White House fight night would pay for a dose of MMR vaccine for 600,000 children.