Shannon Duffy

Activist and union rep; encouraging working folk to wise up and rise up. Tweets are mine.

[Shannon Duffy @GuildDuffy]

@RitchieBusetta @fasc1nate Yeah but some incredible music, though.

[Yinzer G @yinzer_g]

The 5 reasons soccer won't increase in popularity after the world cup is over.

1. The flopping. This goes against the soul of every American. We value grit, toughness and basically not being a pussy.
2. The clock. No one wants to get to the end of a game and have no clue when it's over. Just stop & start the clock when you need to, like sane people.
3. Offsides. Just put a line out there like everyone else. This floating line you have makes the game unwatchable. It's like a built in, anti-excitement glitch you manufactured for your game.
4. Red cards. What a stupid rule that you automatically get kicked out for the next game for getting one. I can understand suspending someone after a league review of something you did that was horrible. But to automatically get suspended because of what a ref saw at full speed is stupid.
5. Ties. In America we call it kissing your sister, cause that's the same feeling you get after a tie. Pure disgust. In soccer, it seems like the result you prefer most. Play til you have a winner.

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

Two more NBA players have been charged with rigging bets in their games. I truly thought there was no way guys making tens of millions of dollars would risk all of that — and prison time! — for a few hundred grand. I was wrong. Many players are much dumber than I thought.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Megyn Kelly cheered the Supreme Court ruling letting Trump end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants:

“Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us. Those who built it…

Go back to f*cking Haiti!”

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Unearthed audio: RFK Jr. pushes a third-party candidate to drop out in exchange for a taxpayer-funded position in the federal government:

“I can’t go into specifics because there’s legal prohibitions about that.”

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Susan Collins 30 years ago: “I’ve pledged that if I’m elected I will only serve two terms. 12 years is long enough to be in public service.”

[FactPost @factpostnews]

Brooke Rollins announces a Texas goat has been infected with New World Screwworm, bringing the total number of U.S. cases to 5.

This is the 3rd new infection announced today.

[Jermaine Curtis @JermaineCurtis]

When I was with the St. Louis Cardinals, we had a team meeting about hitting with two strikes.

Albert Pujols was leading it.

At the time, he was hitting something ridiculous with two strikes.

I want to say it was around .265.

Naturally, everyone wanted to know how.

So somebody asked:

"What's your two-strike approach?"

Albert's answer surprised me.

He said:

"I think fastball inside and hit it back through the middle."

That was it.

No complicated mechanics.

No secret formula.

Just:

Fastball inside.

Back through the middle.

I remember sitting there thinking:

"Why would you think fastball inside with two strikes?"

So somebody asked him.

And Albert said something I'll never forget.

He said:

"If I can hit a fastball inside back through the middle..."

"I can hit the fastball away."

"I can stay on the changeup."

"I can stay on the slider."

"I can stay on the curveball."

Then he paused.

And said:

"The ball gets deeper."

That's when it clicked for me.

He wasn't trying to pull the inside fastball.

He was using one thought to cover everything.

The more I thought about it...

The more it made sense.

So I started trying it.

And it changed the way I thought about hitting with two strikes.

Instead of worrying about every pitch...

I focused on one.

Fastball inside.

Back through the middle.

See it DEEP.

If you're struggling with two strikes, here's what I'd do tonight:

Round 1: Short Box

(Set the distance somewhere between front toss and batting practice.)

Have a coach throw only fastballs inside.

Your only thought:

"Fastball inside."

Drive the ball back through the middle.

10 swings.

Round 2: Mix Speeds

Now the coach mixes:

- Fastballs
- Changeups
- Breaking balls
- Sliders

But your thought never changes.

You're still looking:

"Fastball inside."

10 swings.

Round 3: Two-Strike BP

Every pitch starts 0-2.

Compete.

Battle.

Use the same approach.

"Fastball inside."

Back through the middle.

10 swings.

That's it.

30 focused swings.

One thought.

One approach.

One goal.

Drive the baseball back through the middle.

One thing I've learned:

Most hitters get worse with two strikes because they add thoughts.

Albert got better because he removed them.

With two strikes, simplicity is a weapon.

Thank you for reading,
Jermaine Curtis

P.S. - If you enjoyed this and thought it was helpful, please share it.

(When you share it, it tells me you want more content like this.)

[🇺🇸 Edward T. Winslow @EdwardTWinz]

NOBODY IS TELLING YOU HOW FUCKED THE FARMERS ARE IN AMERICA RIGHT NOW.

The Agriculture Secretary just confirmed it publicly.

1 in 4 American farmers has NO fertilizer secured for spring planting.

No fertilizer. No crops. No food.

Farm bankruptcies are up 46% in 2025.

160,000 farms closed since 2017.

Less than half of all farmers will even turn a profit this year.

They're not struggling. They're being wiped out.

And the media is busy covering everything else.

The real story behind this hasn't been told yet.. follow me because i'm about to tell it 🚨

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Donald Trump cut in front of Queen Camilla and King Charles to greet officials from his administration.

And this is who tens of millions voted for. What an embarrassment.

[Shannon Duffy @GuildDuffy]

@TerryMoran @iyamiyam It’s unbelievable, unconscionable, and unAmerican!

[Adam Mockler @adammocklerr]

MAGA authoritarianism is pretending the president is “joking” when he makes death threats, but comedians are somehow “shaping public policy” when they make jokes.

[Carter Donnick @CDonnick1]

Commanders might be winning the draft for me considering the picks that they started with.

1st player on my board at 7 and 30th player on my board at 71 and both filled major areas of need. Williams such a good underneath compliment to what Scary does downfield.

Props Peters

[Coach Matt @MVScouting]

Shoutout this legend for being the main reason Antonio Williams wasn’t a Top 50 pick

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

Amazon, which saved $4B in taxes under Trump's Big Ugly Bill, has cut 30,000 jobs since last October.

Verizon, which saved $2B, plans to cut 15,000 jobs this year.

Meta, which saved $3B, plans to lay off 20% or more of its workforce.

Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years.

Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered:

Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures.

Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing.

He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success:

The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren.

He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above.

His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics.

He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades.

The results split into three groups.

The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives.

And the bottom group? By any measure, failures.

The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic.

It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families.

Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity.

There's a concept called "capitalization rate."

It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing?

In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college.

If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else.

Here's something stranger.

Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team:

January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th...

11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March.

This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too.

Why?

The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st.

When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated.

So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games.

We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest.

Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero.

We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar.

Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college.

11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity.

Now here's the part about math.

Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing.

Some people say it's genetic. It's not.

It's attitudinal.

When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it.

When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't.

Here's the proof.

The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes.

It's so long most kids don't finish it.

A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed.

Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance.

The correlation was 0.98.

In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high.

If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time.

If they can do it, they're good at math.

Why do Asian cultures have this attitude?

Gladwell's theory: rice farming.

His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays.

A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year.

Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work.

There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry."

His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry."

If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup.

When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly.

Now consider distance running.

In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day.

In the United States, that number is probably 5,000.

Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%.

Kenya's is probably 95%.

The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention.

Here's the most fascinating finding.

30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability.

Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email.

This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability.

How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood?

You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead.

80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs.

By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership.

Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle.

They say it's the reason they succeeded.

A disadvantage that became an advantage.

Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand:

When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability.

We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become.

We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table.

We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair.

The capitalization argument is liberating.

It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation.

It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out.

If we choose to pay attention.

This 60 minute Microsoft talk will teach you more about success than every self-help book you've ever read combined.

Bookmark this & give it an hour today, no matter what.

[Shannon Duffy @GuildDuffy]

@achase1963 @YahooSports @USATODAY Actually, it was business leaders who pushed for the name change. As a group, those corporate types tend to be more conservative than anything.

[Zephyr Zoidis @zephzoid]

This is one of the most disappointing rabbit holes we have ever seen with our food…

Rao’s was one of the most beloved clean ingredient staples in every health conscious consumers kitchen.

Then they were bought out by Campbell’s in 2024…

In 2025 Campbell’s also bought 49% of La Regina, who produces Rao’s tomato‑based sauces.

The ingredients stayed the same on the back.

But customers are now claiming Rao’s is now more watery, tangier, more acidic, less tomato‑forward, and sometimes “cheap store brand” quality.

Loyal customers say the sauce tastes worse, look more orange, have more chunks, or taste more heavily spiced and bitter.

Then people flipped over the jar…

”Olive Oil” not “Extra Virgin.”

This means they’re likely using a more processed, lower‑grade olive oil (or a blend) rather than a cold‑pressed EVOO.

It’s also not organic, meaning the inputs are undoubtedly conventionally farmed.

Campbell’s says the ingredient list hasn’t changed…

Consumers point out the ratios could be different.

The sourcing quality could be worse.

Whatever it is, many believe something is up.

We’ve seen a long-time pattern of healthy brands achieving the velocity to be acquired from a Big Food company and then just not being the same as it used to be.

Shop local, buy independent, support your farmers.