Elle Fire 🔥 ellefire on bluesky

7th gen Californian now living in New England. Wife of one. Mother of two smalls. Gin connoisseur. Once referred to as a "beach bunny liberal".

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out.

The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing.

Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnick’s own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees.

The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in.

Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal.

The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals.

The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion.

This is your tax money.

It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the President’s children and the Commerce Secretary’s children.

This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close.

We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket.

Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

https://t.co/yFOl7zvOhC

[Elle Fire 🔥 ellefire on bluesky @ElleFireElle]

@dieworkwear The last thing I want my feet to look like is hooves (no disrespect to naturally hooved having animals intended).

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Award-winning Somali referee Omar Artan was officially selected by FIFA to officiate at the 2026 World Cup, but he has reportedly been denied entry to the United States despite travelling on a diplomatic passport.

He landed in Miami and was then flown to Istanbul.

This is why the World Cup should not be held in a fascist country.

[Elle Fire 🔥 ellefire on bluesky @ElleFireElle]

@DKAstrology Shoes indoors. ♈️

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Many of them didn't. Your great-great-grandmother was probably drinking opium for her nerves, sold at the corner shop as cheap as a pint of beer. It was called laudanum, a mix of opium and alcohol that doctors handed out for anxiety, sleeplessness, and "women's troubles." Mothers fed it to crying babies. The babies often stopped crying because they stopped breathing.

The men drank. By 1830 the average American was putting away almost two bottles of liquor a week. Whiskey cost less than coffee or milk. People started their day with a shot and ended it with another. Toddlers drank from their parents' rum mugs.

ADHD has a long paper trail. A Scottish doctor described kids who couldn't focus in 1798. By 1846 there was a popular German children's book about a boy called Fidgety Philipp who couldn't sit still. In 1902, a London children's doctor named George Still wrote a famous paper on the same kids and called it a "defect of moral control." Same kid, three different centuries.

Depression and anxiety had old names too. Melancholia, hysteria, the vapors. Treatments included bloodletting, ice baths, and chaining people to a wall. By 1937, American mental hospitals held 451,672 patients and took up more than half of every hospital bed in the country. Inside the walls, about 1 in 10 patients died each year.

Then came the lobotomy. Between 1949 and 1952, around 50,000 Americans were strapped to a chair while a doctor hammered an ice pick through the thin bone above their eye and wiggled it around inside their brain. It took about ten minutes. Sixty percent of the patients were women. About 1 in 20 died from the procedure. Many of the ones who lived came out with no personality left. The man who invented the procedure won a Nobel Prize.

Britain's male suicide rate hit 30.3 per 100,000 in 1905. The lowest rates ever recorded in British history are happening right now.

Plenty of our ancestors didn't make it. They drank themselves dead. They overdosed on shop-bought opium. They got locked in asylums and never came out. They had picks driven through their eye sockets. They killed themselves in numbers we don't see today. The conditions were always there. The treatments just used to be worse than the disease.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

Can't stop thinking about Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive worth $828 billion, spending $290 million to elect Trump, becoming $563 billion richer since Trump was elected and ending humanitarian aid that will lead to the deaths of 4.5 million of the poorest kids on the planet.

[Art Candee 🍿🥤 @ArtCandee]

MAGA is screeching that Obama violated the Logan Act by meeting with Canadian PM Mark Carney.

Crickets from them on Donald meeting with Netanyahu multiple times under Biden, where he told Bibi to wait for a ceasefire in Gaza until he took office.

🙄

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Kent remarried four years after the death of his wife.

Another reminder that Trump is both a serial liar and a truly awful human being.

If you support, like, vote for him, there’s something truly wrong with you.

[Tuki @TukiFromKL]

🚨Do you understand the irony of what just happened..

the FBI spent two years investigating Hillary Clinton for using a personal email for government work.. it dominated every news cycle.. it decided an election.. "lock her up.."

the man they put in charge of the FBI.. just got his personal email hacked by Iran..

the DOJ confirmed it.. Iran-linked group "Handala" breached FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email and got his data..

think about the timing..

America has fired 850 Tomahawk missiles at Iran this month.. spent billions.. and Iran didn't fire back with a missile..

they walked through the front door of the FBI..

and here's what nobody wants to say out loud.. the FBI Director was using a personal email in the first place.. the same thing the FBI called a national security threat when Hillary did it..

the agency that decides what's a crime.. doesn't follow its own rules..

The rules only apply until you're the one making them.

[Elle Fire 🔥 ellefire on bluesky @ElleFireElle]

@DKAstrology So it is loosely conjunct with chiron in my 10th house and trines my sun and Venus.

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

Oh.

So they want Obama’s nuclear deal minus Obama’s signature.

Got it.

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

Now the administration is thinking about unfreezing Iranian funds as part of the negotiations?

Looking forward to all the “MONEY IS FUNGIBLE!!!” conservatives losing their mind over how Trump is funding Iran’s missile program

[🪼 blob @Stiffy2777]

@Variety

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

The President of the United States is demented—morally and clinically. FDR was in a wheelchair from polio.

See if. you can figure out what the fuck he’s talking about.

“And my wife, by the way, my wife hates when I do this. She said, you know, she's a very classy person. Right. She said, it's so unpresidential. He said, but I did become president. She, somebody, she hates what I dance. I said, everybody wants me to dance. Darling, it's not presidential. She actually said, could you imagine FDR dancing? She said that to me. And I said, there's a long history that perhaps she doesn't know because he wasn't elegant fellow, even as a Democrat, right? He was the attack by Japan. You know, he was quite elegant. But he wouldn't be doing this. But, but nor would too many others, but she says, darling, please, the weightlifting is terrible. And I have to say this, the dancing they really like. She said, they don't like it. They're just being nice to you. I said, that's not right. The place goes crazy. They're screaming, dance. Please, but the weightlifting, but no, they go, get your help. And you see, I want to be more, but I have somebody watching. I want to be more effusive. I want to really, yeah. But she gets it. I dropped the thing, walks off the stage crying, her mother's crying, her father's going, "God gets up." He said, "Have you lifted before a little bit?" And he walks up, being, he could have gone, ding, ding, ding. I think it was 112 pounds, right? It's crazy. For the beautiful boxer, they have boxing now, and they have a young gentleman who transitioned. It was a very good boxer, but he wanted to be a woman, which is, you know, to each his own. Because they want to be very liberal when it comes to these subjects. I'm trying to get that road. It's not an easy vote to get. It's very tough for me to get it. But he transitioned, and he transitioned. And the girl was a champion boxer, from Italy, remember? She got up first round. He had a pum with a left, a left for those, everybody had his butt, but a left, least enough better than anybody. But a left is defense. He goes, "Pum." She's like, "Oh, my God." She walked to the corner, remember? She didn't go down, but she did everything else. She said, "I've never been hit like that before. I don't want to go out again. You can do it. You can do it." Bing. You walked off. She said, "That's..." He happened to win the gold medal that young woman. You won the gold medal. There were two transition people. They're both one gold medals. The whole thing is ridiculous. You have policy on your side. They don't have policy on your side. You have policy.”

[Be A King @BerniceKing]

👋🏾 For anyone saying this doesn’t matter, you’re wrong. Regardless of party affiliation, this should ring the alarm (again).

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

🚨INVESTIGATION: Private equity giants are buying up youth sports facilities & banning parents from taking photos/videos of their own kids, instead forcing them to pay for photos.

When parents ignore the bans, the companies punish the kids.

What stage of capitalism is this?

[Michael Ron Bowling @mrbcyber]

Unbelievable. The main company that sells insurance policies to CIA agents was bought by a Chinese company. MSS must have a massive amount of information on American officials.
https://t.co/VvklDCV9es

[Doc  @DocAtCDI]

When 35-year-old republicans got caught supporting Hitler in a group chat, JD Vance called them “kids.”

When 15 year old children get sexually abused by the president and his pals, they called them “young women.”

This is your republican party, Family Values and all