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🤦‍♂️🇺🇸

[CBS News @CBSNews]

Paint was seen peeling from the floor of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, weeks after a $14 million renovation that included a new color President Trump called “American Flag Blue.”

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Learning financial literacy

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

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%.

[ɴᴀᴅɪ.🤍 @luvblessingz]

We didn’t realize it then, but kids’ shows used to be this calm on purpose.

[Thrilla the Gorilla @ThrillaRilla369]

Instead of adding pink ribbons to their products every October maybe companies should just remove the cancer causing ingredients

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Fox News out there threatening their viewers with a good time

[NotBasquiat06 @NotBasquiat06]

It's crazy how you kind of need money to mature into other stages of life otherwise you just stay where your at

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Congratulations to Graham Platner on his landslide victory in Maine.

Together, we will defeat Oligarchy and create an economy that works for all, not just the few.

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

If the governments job isn’t to secure even basic shit like clean drinking water for its citizens, what’s its actual purpose?! THIS IS WHAT WE WANT OUR TAXES PAYING FOR

[Bob @PoopFromDaButt]

this shit makes me wanna tear up. such easy fixes

[doomer @uncledoomer]

saving 20% of my income so that in 30 years i can afford 11 months of assisted living. the math is airtight

[🌽🌽 Erica, The White Trash Socialist 🌽🌽™️ @herosnvrdie69]

Everything feels like this right now

[Papii🥤 @ammalusty]

"Not all jobs are supposed to earn you a living wage" oh for sure, this is my recreational job.

[Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid]

Entering month 6 of the Mamdani mayorship of NYC and Robberies are down 11%, Retail theft is down 19%, and Murder is down an astounding 21%.

And he did so without "Adding 5000 new cops" to the streets. Instead, he's invested in public safety with free childcare, accessible infrastructure, and better funded schools and libraries. He's proven once again that if we want safer communities, we must invest in People—not Punishments.

[Chris Original Black Navy Vet @Chris4Perkins2]

Whoever the next Democratic president is, they better not start talking about forgiveness and pardons to unify the country. This country will unify behind prosecutions and prison sentences. We're still fighting because the Confederacy was never properly punished. End the cycle.

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

This is what the older generations should try and do more often

[Thrilla the Gorilla @ThrillaRilla369]

The middle class is the most expensive place to live, and no one talks about it. Lower income households get assistance. The wealthy use tax strategies and loopholes. But the middle class pays full taxes, full tuition, full healthcare, full everything. So you work 50 hours a week just to stay in the same place and fund everyone’s life except yours.

[Annie? Rauwerda? @anniierau]

"why use google?" webpage from 1999

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Scientists pulled one kind of bacteria out of a jar of kimchi, fed it to mice, and those mice pooped out twice as much plastic as the mice that didn't get it. That single experiment is behind every "eat kimchi to flush plastic from your body" headline going around this week.

The bacteria, a strain called CBA3656, sticks to nanoplastics. Those are plastic flecks so small they slip straight through your gut wall and end up lodged in your kidneys and brain. In a clean lab dish, the bacteria grabbed 87% of the plastic around it. Then the team ran it through conditions that copy a working human gut, the acid and the constant squeezing, and the grip dropped to 57%. A second kimchi strain they tried fell apart in the same test and held onto just 3%.

So the grabbing part holds up, and in those mice it did push more plastic out the other end. But two details keep this far from dinner advice. The mice were germ-free, raised with no gut bacteria of their own, nothing like the crowded gut you actually have. And the bacteria was purified and fed on its own, in amounts you'd never get from a few bites of cabbage. The team also tested just one type of plastic, the kind in foam cups and takeout boxes, so nobody knows yet whether it grabs the dozens of others you swallow every day.

The irony is almost funny. Kimchi is traditionally salted with sea salt, and sea salt is one of the most common ways plastic sneaks into food in the first place. When scientists checked salt brands from six continents, they found up to 1,674 plastic specks in a single kilogram, with the worst counts in Asian sea salts. Korean food researchers have even started swapping in pink salt to make kimchi, just to cut the plastic. So the same jar can be dropping plastic in while its bacteria carry a bit out.

Salt is also why "just eat more kimchi" falls apart. One cup of cabbage kimchi carries around 750 milligrams of sodium, more than a third of all the salt you're meant to get in a whole day. Korea eats more kimchi than anywhere on earth, and it also has one of the highest stomach cancer rates in the world, something researchers link partly to that heavy salt habit. Eating bowls of it to chase a result from sterile mice would buy you a guaranteed sodium problem for a plastic payoff no one has shown works in people.

Right now there is no proven way to pull microplastics back out of a living human body. This study is a promising first step toward one, built on bacteria people have safely eaten for centuries. But calling it a plastic detox skips every step between a purified strain in a sterile mouse and a tub of kimchi in your fridge.