Deb Strong🌻

@dpsindy.bsky.social Words matter; choose them carefully. #PostcardsToVoters

[Deb Strong🌻 @dpsindy]

https://t.co/5NPt53WoHD

[Sarah Ironside 💙 @SarahIronside6]

Has anyone paused to understand the gravity of the fact that we have a sitting president who will bomb human beings in an attempt to hide the fact that he and Epstein sexually assaulted girls and women? This is truly a level of evil that is hard to comprehend.

[Amelia @amelia_tweetz]

Imagine if a woman president crashed the economy and started a war with no end in sight, and her biggest, seemingly ONLY concern was building a ballroom and redecorating the White House.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Between stock trading by federal officials, insider trading in prediction markets, fixed sporting events, and suspicious moves in energy, integrity in markets feels lower today than at any point in the modern era.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Who needs Pravda?

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

Exactly. White House isn’t gonna allow a private event with journalists and families into the freakin’ White House complex for a banquet

[SiriusB @SiriusBShaman]

They did not take cursive from the schools because children no longer needed it. They took it because of what it was quietly building in them.

Consider what the exercise actually is. A child, six years old, is handed a pen and asked to draw a single unbroken line that becomes a word. The wrist must float. The fingers must hold a living pressure, never quite the same twice, always correcting. The eye must follow the ink forward and trust the hand to finish what it has begun. There is no lifting, no stopping, no starting over mid-word. The loop must close. The ascender must rise and return. The sentence must travel from one margin to the other as a single continuous gesture, and at the end of it the hand must still be steady.

Twelve years of this. Every day. Ten thousand small acts of sustained, self-correcting attention, carried out below the level of conscious thought, until the motion belongs to the body and the body belongs to the motion.

This is not penmanship. It is the slow construction of an interior form.

The hand that has learned to carry a line without breaking it is the hand of a mind that has learned to carry a thought without breaking it. The two are not metaphors for one another. They are the same faculty, trained in the same child, by the same daily discipline. Continuity of the stroke becomes continuity of the reasoning. The patience of the loop becomes the patience of the argument. The commitment to finish a word one has started becomes the commitment to finish a sentence, a paragraph, a life's idea, without reaching for the nearest distraction halfway through.

Print is a different creature entirely. Print lifts. Print stops. Print assembles a word out of separate, stamped, interchangeable pieces, each one beginning and ending in isolation. A mind raised only on print learns to think the way print is made, in discrete tokens, in replaceable units, in fragments that can be recombined by any outside hand without the owner noticing the substitution. It is precisely the shape of thought a language model produces. It is precisely the shape of thought a language model can steer.

Cursive is kata. This is the whole of it. A form repeated daily, for years, not for the sake of the form but for what the repetition lays down in the practitioner beneath the form. The swordsman does not train kata so that one day he may fight in kata. He trains it so that when the moment comes and there is no time to think, the movement is already inside him, older and deeper than thought, and it rises on its own. Cursive was the kata of the literate mind, the daily quiet drilling of continuity, of patience, of a line held steady under the long pressure of its own length. And the signature it produced at the end, that small flourished mark unique to a single human being on earth, was only the outward proof of an inward form no machine and no other hand could ever reproduce.

Take the kata away and the practitioner is left with vocabulary in place of faculty. He can recognise a whole thought when he encounters one. He cannot carry one himself. He can admire a finished argument. He cannot sustain one long enough to close its loop. He begins books he does not finish, sentences he does not end, ideas he abandons the moment the screen in his palm offers him a brighter one. And when the machine begins feeding him tokens in the exact shape his schooling taught him to receive, he meets it with no interior resistance at all, because no interior form was ever built in him to push back with.

They removed it quietly, across a generation, and they removed it in the last years before the machines arrived. Twelve years of daily practice in unbroken, embodied, self-authored thought, gone from the curriculum of almost every child in the Western world, just as the instruments designed to complete their sentences for them came online.

The hand forgets. The mind, having never been taught the kata, forgets a thing it never knew it had.

That is what cursive was. That is what was taken. And that is why the thought of anyone who still writes by hand, in long unlifted lines, remains, quietly, stubbornly, and without their ever needing to announce it, their own.

Now the question stands open. What else has been banned, phased out, quietly retired from the curriculum and from common life over these same decades, under the same soft excuses? Mental arithmetic. Memorisation of poetry. Latin. Logic as a formal subject. Map reading. Knot work. The keeping of a commonplace book. The reading aloud of long passages in class. Singing in parts.

What was each of those actually building in the child, beneath the surface of the lesson, and whose interest was served by its disappearance?

[ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ @LePapillonBlu2]

Do not stop talking about Epstein.
Do not stop talking about Epstein.
Do not stop talking about Epstein.
Do not stop talking about Epstein.
Do not stop talking about Epstein.
Do not stop talking about Epstein.
Do not stop talking about Epstein.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This paragraph by C.S. Lewis hits so hard:

“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”

[Jesica Bossi @jebossi]

Imperdible mensaje de Chistina Koch tras su vuelta del espacio.
Oratoria 10/10.
Contenido 10/10.
Emoción 10/10.
Gente que sí ♥️

[Deb Strong🌻 @dpsindy]

@MikeLevin https://t.co/d5lr0WgoiX Following orders from his religious advisor.

[Tim Hogan 浩勤 @TimInHonolulu]

1/ In a rapidly deteriorating Trump White House environment, the Office of Legal Counsel's absurd opinion that the Federal Records Act is unconstitutional, could mean that they have already begun the destruction of Trump records to protect the people who have conspired with him.

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

FINALLY: Some coverage on trump's cognitive decline. This entire country should be embarrassed that he's our President.

That story about the pen and his call with Sharpie? Never happened.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

URGENT: Do Not Download the New White House App:

The app has the tools to access your precise location in the background every few minutes. They literally can track you.

It defines:

Android location permissions:
ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION (precise GPS)
ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION (approximate)
ACCESS_BACKGROUND_LOCATION

Timing constants:
FOREGROUND_UPDATE_TIME_MS = 270000 → 4.5 minutes
BACKGROUND_UPDATE_TIME_MS = 570000 → 9.5 minutes
Also:
TIME_FOREGROUND_SEC = 300 (5 min)
TIME_BACKGROUND_SEC = 600 (10 min)

[MAKS 26 🇺🇦👀 @Maks_NAFO_FELLA]

🤔🇺🇸🇺🇦🇪🇺 WSJ: Separately, the Pentagon notified Congress on Monday that it intended to divert about $750 million in funding provided by NATO countries through the PURL program to restock the U.S. military’s own inventories, rather than to send additional assistance to Ukraine.

The first official said it was unclear whether European countries providing their funds for the initiative to bolster Ukraine understood how the money was being spent.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Confirmed what I suspected in a post last night. Thune reached a deal with Dems to fund DHS except for ICE and Trump rejected it. DONALD TRUMP is to blame for airport chaos - not Democrats.

[Rep. Don Beyer @RepDonBeyer]

It's important not to shy away from candidly discussing the President's increasingly erratic behavior. His worsening instability is a clear and growing threat, not only to the American people but to the world.

[Tom Joseph @TomJChicago]

As events spin out of control due to his incompetence, Trump has no idea what to do other than to say the U.S. will "massively blow up" "with strength and power never seen before." He has Frontotemporal Dementia. He's truly the Mad King as the fires rage. He must be removed to resolve this disaster.

[Alan Eyre @AlanEyre1]

spot-on, from @anneapplebaum
Money quote:

"Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places."

"He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before."
https://t.co/WRAETdYbvM

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

He took the greatest military force in world history, lost a war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded that the media lie about this and everything else. I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength. His weakness is something negative, gravitational, so deep that it can draw in a whole country. But only if we fail to see it. Only if we let it.