Jules

Retired professional, educated, minority, social justice, politics, world religions, spirituality, gardening and #FBR resister.

[CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil @CBSEveningNews]

About 400 sites managed by the National Park Service are facing a maintenance backlog estimated at more than $24 billion, but the money aimed for repairs is being diverted. The Trump administration has reportedly used at least $90 million from national park entry fees to help pay for beautification efforts in the nation's capital ahead of the America 250 celebration.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

My July 5th Diatribe after Returning from Europe again:

The weirdest thing about leaving America is realizing how much of America is just a sales pitch.

You spend your whole life hearing “greatest country on Earth,” then you go overseas and see clean trains, safer streets, affordable medicine, cities where people can walk without playing Frogger with an SUV, and workers who take vacations without acting like they committed treason.

And then you come home.

You come home to potholes, medical debt, school shooting drills, $17 airport sandwiches, people living in tents under highways, politicians wearing flag pins (or worse, gun pins) while doing absolutely nothing for the people standing in food bank lines, and billionaires being treated like they’re the fragile ones.

And somehow we’re all supposed to stand there, hand over heart, and pretend this is normal.

I don’t hate America. I hate what America has been taught to tolerate.

I hate that we call basic things “radical.” Healthcare? Radical. Paid leave? Radical. Clean air? Radical. Kids not getting shot in math class? Somehow political.

Meanwhile, the loudest “patriots” are usually the same people telling struggling Americans to shut up, stop complaining, and be grateful.

Grateful for what? A flag doesn’t pay rent. A bald eagle doesn’t cover insulin. Fireworks don’t fix bridges. And chanting “USA” doesn’t make a broken system less broken.

America has incredible people. That’s the tragedy. The people are better than the system they’ve been forced to defend.

So no, I’m not going to call America the greatest country on Earth just because it has the best marketing department.

Real patriotism isn’t pretending the country is perfect.

Real patriotism is being angry that it isn’t, and blaming minorities and immigrants for your own piece of shit life that you created.

[Elizabeth Warren @ewarren]

Here’s your periodic reminder: The worst is yet to come from Trump’s Big Ugly Bill.

And that’s by design. Republicans wanted some of the worst impacts to take effect AFTER the midterms. We won’t be fooled.

[Jeff Merkley @JeffMerkley]

A dark day: the Supreme Court flung the doors wide open to quid pro quo corruption in our electoral process. The decision to obliterate caps on spending by political parties is a gift from the MAGA majority on the Court to their extremist benefactors.

[Steve Schmidt @SteveSchmidtSES]

This is grotesque and un-American. 11 stars represents the Confederate States of America, not the United States of America.

[BlueDream @58bugeye]

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was caught sneaking out of speaker Mike Johnson’s office.

A Supreme Court justice should not have a private meeting with the speaker of the house.

What were they talking about?

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

All over the beautiful DC mall are random barriers and fences so tall you can’t see over them. It’s hard to get around and it’s ugly. Nothing says “freedom 250” like miles and miles of hideous fences and barriers and soldiers. I guess that’s what Trump likes…

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

I want to propose a toast to Sergey Brin, who's unintentionally making the case for a billionaire tax better than anyone else could.

[Jules @julesBCE]

@JamesTate121 @1goodtern Someone else called it, “The Art of the Peel”. 😂😂😂

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

The top 1% now hold as much wealth as the entire bottom 90% of Americans combined — about 32% each.

This is what runaway inequality looks like, according to the Fed's most recent data released this month.

[Jules @julesBCE]

@ReallyAmerican1 @chipfranklin 😂😂😂” It may not be that surprising that Trump has been outsmarted by a single-cell organism: algae”

[Really American 🇺🇸 @ReallyAmerican1]

Chip Franklin on Trump: “This balding, draft-dodging, spoiled fat boy who called veterans suckers and losers doesn’t give a shit about America’s birthday except that he can use it to excite his Kid Rock knuckle-brained MAGA base. It may not be that surprising that Trump has been outsmarted by a single-cell organism: algae”

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

America has a big birthday to celebrate, so of course Donald Trump is trying to cash in and make it all about himself.

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

Some thoughts on Capitulation Day.
This level of defeat in Iran is only possible at the hands of a super loser like Trump.
To win a war means changing the politics of the enemy such that they must surrender. That is what Iran just did to the United States.

[Rocket J 🇺🇸 @Agility_Fan]

@PenguinSix

[Eh, what’s up Doc  @rabbitSZN2]

@PenguinSix

[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.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: GAUNTLET THROWN! Gavin Newsom's top lawyer demands that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche investigate Trump after the Justice Department began probing the governor and his wife.

This is a brilliant countermove...

“Calling this investigation a fishing expedition is actually too generous. If your commitment to rooting out corruption were serious, the enormous resources that you have poured into this investigation looking for a crime that does not exist would be focused elsewhere," legal affairs secretary David Sapp wrote to Blanche.

Not content to leave it at that, Sapp also requested immediate access to “all documents and records including but not limited to memoranda, emails, text messages, and Signal messages” related to the sham investigation into the governor.

He added that Blanche should instead turn his attention to "the open-air corruption market that the White House has become.” The fact that there is a tradition of not prosecuting a sitting president is “no excuse for ignoring open and notorious corruption by his family and those around him.”

“The United States Department of Justice selectively leaked uncorroborated details about ongoing investigative matters involving the Governor and First Partner, so it should not be a problem for you to confirm whether US DOJ has opened any investigations into the instances of apparent public corruption detailed above involving the President and his allies,” concluded Sapp.

On Monday, Newsom revealed that the Justice Department has begun investigating him and his wife in a blatant attempt to waylay his possible presidential run. It represents just the latest instance of Trump weaponizing the DOJ — a once hallowed nonpartisan institution — to go after his political enemies. It's the kind of thing we once believed could only happen in tinpot dictatorships.

"He isn't coming after me because of mean tweets, but because I am considering running for President," Newsom stated. "He hates that I consistently call him out. He is simply the most corrupt President in American history. We have nothing to hide Mr. President, come after me. I am not going anywhere. The country is watching."

Of course, the chances of Blanche actually turning around and investigating his boss are precisely zero. Blanche is a MAGA hatchet man to the core. He'd sooner reduce the DOJ's credibility to ashes than actually do his job on behalf of the American people.

That said, this messaging from Newsom's camp is incredibly important. We can't allow this White House's corruption to become normalized. Just because Trump and his cronies refuse to stop breaking the law doesn't mean we should stop calling it out!

Please ❤️ and share if you'd gladly vote for Gavin Newsom!

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: Governor Kathy Hochul has signed sweeping legislation banning ICE agents from wearing masks and entering sensitive locations like churches and schools. This is huge.