Bill Bell Jr.

Dad. Husband. Tweets are my own and should largely be ignored.

[Bill Bell Jr. @WFBell]

https://t.co/JcBTUpTv8L

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Science has confirmed that a weekend spent forest bathing can increase the activity and number of disease fighting cells in the immune system by as much as 80 percent with benefits that can last for an entire month.

The challenge is significant. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the average American spends approximately 90 percent of their life indoors a habit that contributes to growing health problems.

In our screen filled and high stress world a centuries old Japanese practice supported by rigorous modern research offers a simple and effective natural solution. For more than two decades Dr. Qing Li an immunologist at Nippon Medical School has studied Shinrin yoku also known as forest bathing. His work has translated the calming experience of being in nature into measurable biological effects.

Dr. Li has demonstrated that trees release phytoncides antimicrobial volatile organic compounds that form part of the forests natural defense system. When people inhale these compounds during walks in the forest the chemicals enter the bloodstream. This process reduces stress hormones and helps shift the body from a chronic fight or flight state into a restorative mode.

The physiological benefits are both powerful and remarkably long lasting. Dr. Lis research shows that exposure to phytoncides significantly boosts the number and activity of natural killer cells. These white blood cells are essential for destroying virus infected cells and tumor cells. A three day two night forest bathing trip can increase natural killer cell activity by up to 80 percent. These protective effects do not disappear immediately upon returning to daily life but can persist for up to a month.

This evidence makes a strong scientific case for incorporating regular time in nature as an important element of preventive health care.

[Li, Q. (2022). Effects of forest environment (Shinrin-yoku/Forest bathing) on health promotion and disease prevention: The establishment of 'Forest Medicine'. Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, 27, 43]

[Bill Bell Jr. @WFBell]

Lovely

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A potluck. Everyone brings one dish. I have never been so out of my depth in my life.

I was invited to a gathering. "Just bring a dish to share," they said. Simple words. I did not sleep for three days.

Because I understood instantly what this was. A summit. Every guest, a lord of their own house, arriving bearing tribute. And tribute is judged. Tribute is ranked. To bring the wrong dish to the wrong table is to fall in standing before your peers, possibly forever.

So I prepared. I made my finest dish. I carried it to the door with two hands and a straight back, braced for the weighing of my worth.

The first lord arrived with a bowl of orange powder noodles. Macaroni and cheese. The crowd roared. He set it down at the center of the table. The CENTER. I noted this. The center is the seat of power.

The second lord brought a tower of small brown meat orbs in red sauce. "Meatballs," he announced, like a man laying down a sword. They were placed beside the macaroni. A strong showing. An alliance, perhaps.

I studied the table like a battlefield map. Potato salad: defensive, reliable, old money. A vegetable tray, untouched, clearly a hostage offering no one expected to win. And then a woman walked in, raised a flat box overhead, and the entire room turned and CHEERED.

Pizza. She had brought pizza. Store-bought. Still in the box.

I was stunned. She had not even cooked it. And yet the people rejoiced as if a king had entered. I revised my entire understanding of the hierarchy on the spot. Effort means nothing here. Only the roar of the crowd decides rank.

I placed my dish down, humbly, near the napkins. A peasant's position. I accepted it.

And then a man tapped my shoulder, pointed at my dish, and said the words that changed everything.

"Whoa, did you make this? This is amazing. Everybody, you GOTTA try this guy's thing."

The room turned. The room came. The room ATE. My dish vanished in ninety seconds. The pizza woman herself took a second helping and looked at me with respect.

I had won the summit. By accident. With a dish I placed by the napkins.

I understand nothing about this country. I have never been happier. I am hosting the next one.

So tell me, America.

Is there a system to the potluck? A secret rank? A hidden law?

I have decided there is not.

You just bring the thing you love, and everyone eats it, and somehow everybody wins.

It is the most insane way to hold a war.

I will fight in every single one.

[Jenni @hashjenni]

Until my final breath I will never understand how January 6th wasn't an instant dealbreaker for every single American voter

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

“Unprecedented destruction”

Majority of U.S. military sites in the Middle East damaged by Iran, CNN investigation reveals.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth desperately tried to keep the extent of the damage from the public so people wouldn’t see how badly this was botched. Now the images are coming out and they’re disturbing.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank.

It just published a 30-year study showing immigrants paid 14.5 trillion dollars more in taxes than they received in government benefits.

Every single year. For thirty years. Without exception.

The country was lied to.

Here is what the study found.🧵

[Henry Winkler @hwinkler4real]

Whisper everyone

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

Trump had another mental health episode and spiraled out of control on social media last night:

12:18am - Demands Chuck Schumer resign
12:19am - Posts a tweet saying Obama tried to “overthrow the government in 2016.”
12:22am - Reposts a statement from Sen. Mike Lee calling for the filibuster to be removed
12:27am - Posts a conspiracy video alleging Obama and Hillary Clinton committed treason
12:27am - Posts a tweet from a MAGA account calling for Obama and Clinton to be arrested for treason
12:28am - Another post calling for treason charges against Obama and Clinton
12:28am - Yet another post demanding treason charges for Obama and Clinton
12:29am - Posts an AI image of a man holding a sign
1:13am - Demands the 2020 election be “wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect.”
2:43am - Posts about Clint Eastwood complimenting him
2:44am - Posts about Elon Musk calling the Southern Poverty Law Center a “scam”
2:45am - Posts about a far-right podcast

This man is not well. He is a demented lunatic who is spiraling out of control. He must be impeached and removed from office.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

The journalist who took down Harvey Weinstein just spent 18 months investigating Sam Altman.

And what he found out is genuinely insane:

The people who built OpenAI went on record saying he can't be trusted with the future of humanity.

A Microsoft executive even compared him to Bernie Madoff.

This isn't just some hit piece.

It's 100+ interviews, secret memos, HR documents, Slack messages, and private notes that had never been seen before.

Here's everything you have to know about Ronan Farrow's investigation:

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist and CO-FOUNDER, compiled 70 pages of internal evidence against Altman. Slack messages. HR files. Behavioral analysis.

The word at the top of his list of Altman's "consistent patterns": lying.

He sent the documents as disappearing messages because he was "terrified" someone would find them. They became legendary in Silicon Valley. Insiders just call them "the Ilya Memos."

Dario Amodei, another co-founder who left to start Anthropic, kept his own private notes. One line: "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself."

Paul Graham, the man who RECRUITED Altman to run Y Combinator, told colleagues Altman had been "lying to us all the time." Multiple YC partners had complained about Altman's behavior by 2018. He was effectively forced out in 2019 despite publicly claiming for YEARS that he left voluntarily.

Former board members described him as "unconstrained by truth."

And the investigation found that Altman reportedly lied to the board about obtaining safety approvals for some of ChatGPT's most controversial features.

That's the man running an $852 billion company with 900 million weekly users and a Pentagon contract.

But here's where this gets really crazy:

The New Yorker investigation dropped on Sunday.

SAME DAY, Altman publishes a 13 page policy paper proposing robot taxes, a public wealth fund, and a four-day workweek. The most ambitious social policy document in OpenAI's history.

Dropped within HOURS of the most damaging article ever written about him.

That's not coincidence.

Monday: Elon Musk files a court motion demanding Altman be REMOVED as CEO. He wants the for-profit conversion completely unwound.

Then Friday at 3:45 AM: a 20yo throws a Molotov cocktail at Altman's San Francisco mansion. It bounces off the house. Lights the gate on fire. An hour later, same guy shows up at OpenAI HQ threatening to burn the building down. Police arrest him on the spot.

Nobody was hurt.

But within hours, Altman posts a photo of his husband and 1yo child on his blog. Writes that he hopes the image "might dissuade the next person." Then blames the New Yorker article for making things "more dangerous" for him.

In 5 days, Altman went from the target of the most devastating investigation in tech history to the sympathetic father whose family was attacked.

Now anyone who criticizes him has to do it in the shadow of a firebombing.

The New Yorker spent 18 months building the case that Altman is dangerous. Altman turned it into the reason HE'S in danger.

And none of this changes what Farrow actually found:

- The co-founders don't trust him
- The former board doesn't trust him
- The chief scientist documented 70 pages of evidence and was too scared to send them through normal channels
- Paul Graham says he was lied to
- A Microsoft executive put him in the same sentence as Madoff

The trial starts in 16 days.

If Musk wins, the for-profit conversion gets unwound and Altman is removed.

If Altman wins, the man that every person who helped build OpenAI has publicly warned about gets permanent, unchecked control of the most powerful AI company on Earth.

Either way, one thing is now undeniable...

The people closest to Sam Altman are the ones screaming the loudest warnings.

And this week proved he knows exactly how to make sure nobody listens.

Peak manipulation.

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

"My name's Raymond. I'm 73. I work the parking lot at St. Joseph's Hospital. Minimum wage, orange vest, a whistle I barely use. Most people don't even look at me. I'm just the old man waving cars into spaces.
But I see everything.

Like the black sedan that circled the lot every morning at 6 a.m. for three weeks. Young man driving, grandmother in the passenger seat. Chemotherapy, I figured. He'd drop her at the entrance, then spend 20 minutes hunting for parking, missing her appointments.

One morning, I stopped him. "What time tomorrow?"
"6:15," he said, confused.
"Space A-7 will be empty. I'll save it."
He blinked. "You... you can do that?"
"I can now," I said.

Next morning, I stood in A-7, holding my ground as cars circled angrily. When his sedan pulled up, I moved. He rolled down his window, speechless. "Why?"
"Because she needs you in there with her," I said. "Not out here stressing."
He cried. Right there in the parking lot.

Word spread quietly. A father with a sick baby asked if I could help. A woman visiting her dying husband. I started arriving at 5 a.m., notebook in hand, tracking who needed what. Saved spots became sacred. People stopped honking. They waited. Because they knew someone else was fighting something bigger than traffic.
But here's what changed everything, A businessman in a Mercedes screamed at me one morning. "I'm not sick! I need that spot for a meeting!"

"Then walk," I said calmly. "That space is for someone whose hands are shaking too hard to grip a steering wheel."

He sped off, furious. But a woman behind him got out of her car and hugged me. "My son has leukemia," she sobbed. "Thank you for seeing us."

The hospital tried to stop me. "Liability issues," they said. But then families started writing letters. Dozens. "Raymond made the worst days bearable." "He gave us one less thing to break over."

Last month, they made it official. "Reserved Parking for Families in Crisis." Ten spots, marked with blue signs. And they asked me to manage it.

But the best part? A man I'd helped two years ago, his mother survived, came back. He's a carpenter. Built a small wooden box, mounted it by the reserved spaces. Inside? Prayer cards, tissues, breath mints, and a note,

"Take what you need. You're not alone. -Raymond & Friends"
People leave things now. Granola bars. Phone chargers. Yesterday, someone left a hand-knitted blanket.
I'm 73. I direct traffic in a hospital parking lot. But I've learned this: Healing doesn't just happen in operating rooms. Sometimes it starts in a parking space. When someone says, "I see your crisis. Let me carry this one small piece."

So pay attention. At the grocery checkout, the coffee line, wherever you are. Someone's drowning in the little things while fighting the big ones.

Hold a door. Save a spot. Carry the weight no one else sees.
It's not glamorous. But it's everything."

Let this story reach more hearts....

Ai image is for demonstration purpose only

Credit: Mary Nelson

[BonkDaCarnivore @BonkDaCarnivore]

Notice how you don't hear anything about Greenland any more all of a sudden? Not even from Trump.

As I discussed previously, Denmark's largest pension fund started selling US treasuries after Trump claimed he held all the cards. In response, Trump threatened all of Europe that they better stop it or else he was going to retaliate. So a Swedish pension fund started dumping its treasuries, too.

Trump caved, and made a "deal" (with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte) - ignoring for a moment that Denmark and Greenland were excluded from these "negotiations", so there was no deal - to *checks notes* get the same privileges the US always had, he took a quick victory lap, and then memory holed the entire thing.

Anyhow, that's why it's been over a week since you've heard the word "Greenland". And likely never will again.

The MAGA way. Claim victory, even in the face of overwhelming defeat.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

People without empathy vs people who make us continue to believe in humanity.

[No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen @NoLieWithBTC]

More than 200,000 Danish citizens have signed a petition to buy California as a response to Trump’s attempt to take Greenland.

They say they will provide Californians with “rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.”

[𝐃𝐔𝐓𝐂𝐇 @pr0ud_americans]

This is hilarious, he's got some talent.😂

[Tired Peasant @HorrorGorl]

Mad enough yet?

[Tara Setmayer 🌻 🇺🇸 @TaraSetmayer]

So, CBS News decided not to air this 25 yr veteran federal agent pointing out all the ways the ICE agent was in the wrong for shooting Renee Good, on its broadcast (I wonder why🤨).
At least it’s online. Reshare.

[Leaders 𝕏 Junction @LeadersJunction]

The best definition of self discipline‼️‼️

[Miss Ally @MissAlly_01]

Ian Fleming's original James Bond novels haven't aged well. For example, Moonraker, published 70 years ago in April 1955, features a villain who's a super-rich industrialist & rocket-maker seeking to cause chaos because he's a secret Nazi.
Such a silly idea! 😆

[Charlie Sykes @SykesCharlie]

My shocked face.

[MisterRogersQuotes @MisterRogersSay]

With all the sadness and destruction, negativity and rage expressed throughout the world, it’s tough not to wonder where the loving presence is. Well, we don’t have to look very far. Deep within each of us is a spark of the divine just waiting to be used to light up a dark place.