The last time the US had Robber Barons — men who hoarded wealth while workers struggled to survive — was the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. Workers had organized into unions, and the threat of collective power was enough to force action. The rich gave back — not out of decency, but because workers demanded it. Today's Robber Barons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos buy the narrative, platforms, newspapers, & politicians. They don't fear us — yet. We’re still fighting back because history shows us what works: organized, relentless, loud collective action. It worked in the 1880s. It's the only thing that's ever worked for working people.
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.
I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is.
University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages.
Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures.
There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them.
If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything.
Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings:
Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them.
Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.
Nobody wants a city on Mars. Nobody wants AI in every app. Nobody wants a robot butler. Nobody wants data centers everywhere. Nobody wants flying cars or humanoid robots. We want clean water, we want bees to survive, and we want a habitable planet.
This is directly due to income inequality. The wealthy hoard so much wealth the tax base for social security has been narrowing for years due to regressive tax policies. Congress could easily fix this
This is the last completely Christian village in the Holy Land. This is what Israel just did to it. Are you going to do anything about it, Ambassador Huckabee? @USAmbIsrael
Did you know the TV show “To Catch a Predator” was cancelled because they kept catching law enforcement, teachers, preachers, local officials, and other people who were supposed to protect children?
The final straw? An Assistant District Attorney in Texas was courting who he thought was a 13-year-old boy. He didn’t show for the sting, so they sent law enforcement and the camera crew to his home. The police entered, and Louis Conradt shot himself, taking his own life.
Can’t make this shit up.