Lisa D Rose

Art & Graphic Design

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On this day in 1776, the United States was actually born. Not July 4. July 2. That's the day the Continental Congress voted to break from Britain, and John Adams was so certain of it that he predicted July 2 would be the great American holiday forever. He nailed everything except the date.

The vote came down to the wire, and one man had to ride through the night to save it. Delaware's delegation was split, one for independence, one against, which meant the colony's vote canceled itself out. The tie-breaker, Caesar Rodney, was 80 miles away in Delaware. He got word that he was needed and rode all night through a summer thunderstorm, sick and in pain, boots and spurs still on, and made it into Philadelphia just in time to cast Delaware's vote for independence.

The other holdouts fell into place too. In Pennsylvania, the men most opposed, including John Dickinson, deliberately stayed away from the chamber so their colony could swing to yes. South Carolina came around for the sake of a united front. When the roll was called, twelve colonies voted for independence and not a single one voted against. New York simply abstained, waiting on permission from home.

And so, on July 2, 1776, it was done. The colonies had legally, officially declared themselves free. The next day Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that this day "will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival," with "pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations." Fireworks and all. He was describing the Fourth of July two days early.

So why do we celebrate the 4th? Because that's the day Congress approved the final wording of the document explaining the decision, the Declaration of Independence. The vote to be free happened on the 2nd. The paperwork got finished on the 4th, and history remembered the paperwork.

The country was actually born in a rainstorm and a roll call on July 2, thanks in part to one sick man who refused to let a tie decide the fate of a nation.

[U.S. Soccer Men's National Team @USMNT]

FOUND A WAY THROUGH! 🇺🇸

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia says he asked for a budget increase to do more audits to stop the massive fraud taking place

He says in response LA Democrats have cut his budget over 3 years and reduced his staff

He says they did this because they don’t want transparency, “Over the past 3 to 4 years, accountants and auditors have been slashed at the City of LA. If you ask me honestly, does City Hall care about transparency and accountability? I'd say no”

One report I found said 27 positions stripped from the Controller’s office

They handle 800 claims and complaints of fraud and abuse per year but can’t investigate all due to understaffing

They only have about 8 performance auditors limiting them to just 2–3 performance audits per year despite 40+ departments and hundreds of programs

Democrats are laundering money and making sure auditors can’t catch it

They only have 5 investigators for waste fraud and abuse despite being America’s second largest city

How by design

[Paul Noble @paul__ux]

Here's an interactive version. Make your own bracket predictions.

→ https://t.co/xBjyZX5Oec

[Matthew Kobach @mkobach]

I now demand all brackets to be designed in a circle

This is beautiful

[I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 @ImMeme0]

Hugo Chávez, like Zohran Mamdani, vowed to smash entrenched elites, redistribute wealth, and end poverty through bold socialist programs.

Result in Venezuela? Roughly 8 million people, a full quarter of the population, fled the country in desperation from hyperinflation, shortages, and collapse.

Yet fans of Mamdani cheer the same playbook for NYC, convinced this time socialism will magically deliver in the world’s financial capital, despite its spectacular failure just hours away by plane.

History isn’t a suggestion. It’s a warning.

[Dan Bongino @dbongino]

Dear socialists,
When you get a minute, and that shouldn’t be hard considering most of you don’t have jobs, pop in to South Florida and find a Cuban cafe. Make sure to tell everyone there sipping their coffee how great socialism is.
Let us know how it goes.
Thanks!

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

The world is outraged about why Israel is in Lebanon.

This is Hezbollah's massive underground terror tunnel, full of weapons, just a few miles from Israel's border.

And there is your answer to why Israel is fighting in Lebanon.

[Senator Ron Johnson @SenRonJohnson]

https://t.co/pPI52Hznwv

[Brandon Fugal @BrandonFugal]

I find it interesting that there appears to be a total media blackout & suppression pattern regarding Fauci & the recent official Tulsi Gabbard ODNI releases with new communications, emails, and notes (NOT fringe claims) challenging Fauci's sworn statements, raising serious questions on funding, COVID origins & transparency. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NYT, & Washington Post: No prime-time segments, front-page treatments, or in-depth reporting in available searches & transcripts.

[U.S. Soccer Men's National Team @USMNT]

GOT THE GROUP! ✅

[FIFA World Cup @FIFAWorldCup]

🇺🇸 USA have qualified for the Round of 32!

#FIFAWorldCup

[Stars n Stripes FC 🇺🇸 @starsnstripesfc]

Is it Friday yet? #USMNT

[Nick Adams @NickAdamsinUSA]

It takes a guy from Germany to remind millions of Americans how great our country is.

Never let the media get you down. We live in the GREATEST country in the history of the world where anything is possible.

Let's fight to keep it that way!

[Lisa D Rose @lisadrose]

The Lockdown Dissidents https://t.co/QqHWzBLODK via @YouTube tells the story of researchers like Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, and Robert Redfield—voices who say they were sidelined and censored when they questioned the public health consensus.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

The result was almost too clean to publish.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.

On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.

She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.

Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.

The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.

Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.

Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.

Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.

Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.

Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.

Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.

The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.

The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.

And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.

[NASA @NASA]

We're building a Moon Base!

@NASAMoonBase will serve as a habitat where astronauts live and work during long-term science missions.

Join us at 2pm ET on Tuesday, May 26, for a live news event where we’ll share updates on our lunar exploration plans: https://t.co/IJXA7xYwju

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

This New York Times "article" about Israel is such a journalistic atrocity that I actually feel stupid reading it out loud.

If everyone at the NYT who is responsible for this is not fired, then the publication will lose whatever shred of credibility it has left.

[Stewart Wiseman @stewartwiseman]

Today, the Civil Commission released Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity — the product of more than two years of documentation, legal analysis, archival work, and testimony collection. It is the most important work I have ever been part of.

This report was born in the space between atrocity and denial. It documents patterns of sexual and gender-based violence committed during the October 7 attacks and in captivity, preserving evidence that too many sought to minimize, dismiss, or erase.

The work demanded confronting materials and testimonies of extraordinary brutality. Justice cannot exist without recognition, and recognition cannot exist without people willing to preserve the truth with rigor, care, and moral clarity.

What makes this report so significant is not only the scale of the investigation (hundreds of testimonies, thousands of visual records, years of analysis) but its insistence that these crimes be understood within the frameworks of international law, accountability, and human dignity.

Contributing to this report has been one of the most meaningful and consequential responsibilities of my life. Working alongside an extraordinary team of lawyers, archivists, and documenters, I had the privilege of contributing to the report’s legal findings and analysis under international human rights and international criminal law, helping document and assess crimes that many sought to deny, minimize, or erase.

I hope people will read the report in full, engage seriously with its findings, and understand what is at stake when sexual violence in conflict is denied, politicized, or ignored.

The truth deserves a permanent place in the historical and legal record.

Link to full report below.

@CochavElkayam @theCC07