CjS

[Vincent James @davincentjames]

The last time a president went against Israel’s wishes he was…

1. Removed (Nixon after he was caught talking about purging Jews from government)

2. Killed (JFK after he blocked Israel from getting nukes)

3. Blackmailed and exposed (Clinton after the Wye River Summit)

[Vincent James @davincentjames]

There’s more evidence to convince any jury that ISRAEL killed JFK…

Here is everything you need to know in only 2 minutes…

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 10. In 2024, American viewers spent 55.62 billion minutes streaming Bluey on Disney+, making it the most-watched show on any US streaming platform for the year, beating every drama, every reality show, every adult series on every platform. It runs under 10 minutes per episode.

Bluey is an animated Australian series about a family of Blue Heeler dogs. It premiered on the Australian ABC in 2018, was picked up by Disney+ in 2019, and now airs in 160 countries. The show has 154 episodes. Joe Brumm, who created it at a small studio in Brisbane, has said his goal is to reflect a 6-year-old's emotional world through play, with parents who are present rather than peripheral, and where problems get solved through imagination rather than removed by adult authority.

The show was not designed by an algorithm. It was not optimized for watch time. There are no scene changes every two seconds, no supersaturated colors, no music that never pauses. It was written by a person who wanted to make something true about how families actually work, and it was made slowly enough to get the small moments right.

After decades of children's content moving in one direction, a children's show built around slowness, parental presence, and emotional honesty became the single most-watched program across all of American streaming for an entire year. Marc de Rosnay, a professor of child development at the University of Wollongong, has said if a couple asked him for parenting advice, he would tell them to watch Bluey. The show also topped the streaming charts in 2025, accumulating 45.2 billion minutes, this time beating Stranger Things.

The researchers whose work runs through this series, from Rogers to Cooney to the teams at MIT and CU Boulder, were all describing the same thing: what a child's brain needs most is presence over stimulation. A calm voice. A reply that comes back. An adult in the room who is paying attention. When the market was given a show that offered that, they watched it more than anything else on television.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 9. At a dinner party near Gramercy Park in 1966, Carnegie Corporation executive Lloyd Morrisett told a public television producer something that had been frustrating him for years. His foundation had tried six experiments to close the educational gap for poor children before kindergarten. They reached a few hundred kids.

The producer was Joan Ganz Cooney. Her question that evening, which she had been working toward through her career in public affairs television, was whether TV's hold on young children could be turned from selling to teaching. She spent the following months researching the question, interviewing child development experts, and writing a report to Carnegie titled The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education. The report argued that TV could prepare disadvantaged children for kindergarten at a scale no classroom program could reach.

The Children's Television Workshop launched in 1968, funded by roughly $8 million drawn equally from the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and federal education grants. Cooney called combining rigorous research with TV production "positively heretical," because it had never been done. Every episode was tested with children before it aired. Researchers tracked where eyes moved on screen, what held attention, what created confusion. The formative research shaped the content, not the reverse.

Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969. Studies by the Educational Testing Service found that children who watched it frequently made significantly greater cognitive gains than those who didn't, and teachers rated viewers as better prepared for school. A 2015 study by economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine traced children who had been preschool age when the show first aired and found they performed better in school for years afterward. The benefits were largest for boys and for Black children in economically disadvantaged areas, which was exactly who Cooney had designed the show to reach.

She had wanted children to learn the alphabet the way they already learned advertising jingles: through repetition, music, and something that wanted their attention. The research said it worked. The question Cooney asked at that dinner party in 1966 is the same question this entire series has been circling, from different directions, for ten parts.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 8. In May 2015, TIME magazine ran a headline that circled the globe: humans now had shorter attention spans than goldfish. The story cited a Microsoft Canada report claiming human attention had dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. Both numbers were fabricated.

Microsoft's report attributed the figures to a company called Statistic Brain Research Institute. Journalists who tracked the citations found them leading to two sources. One was a 2008 analytics study of 25 people who quickly left websites they didn't like. The other was a citation from the US National Library of Medicine that, when pulled, contained no relevant data on attention spans. The Microsoft report was not peer-reviewed, its authors were unnamed, and Microsoft has since removed it from its servers.

The goldfish figure fared no better. The 9-second stat wasn't drawn from any study, and no one has measured goldfish attention in any meaningful scientific way. The 3-second goldfish memory is also folklore. Both were invented for the same infographic.

The statistic still circulates. It appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, corporate training decks, and at least a dozen law review articles. A number with no source became a cultural fact because it felt true at a moment when people were already worried about phones.

The real research on screen attention comes from Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, who has measured the behavior for two decades. Her data shows that average time on a single screen before switching dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 75 seconds by 2012, and to 47 seconds by around 2020. That is real and worth knowing. What it measures is how frequently people switch tasks in digital environments, not the maximum capacity of the human brain to sustain focus. The same person who switches screens every 47 seconds can watch a three-hour film without moving.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 7. A Colorado mother named Julie Aigner-Clark filmed her baby daughter playing with stuffed animals in their basement in 1997. She set the footage to classical music and started selling the DVD from her car. The product was called Baby Einstein.

By 2001, Disney had acquired the brand. The premise was simple and appealing: classical music, bright imagery, and early visual stimulation would give infants a developmental head start. Millions of parents bought it. Baby Einstein became one of the best-selling baby products in American history.

In August 2007, the Journal of Pediatrics published a University of Washington study that tested that premise directly. The researchers, Frederick Zimmerman and Dimitri Christakis, surveyed more than 1,000 families across Minnesota and Washington state. Parents were asked how much time their infants spent watching baby DVDs, and then their children were tested on vocabulary. For babies aged 8 to 16 months, every additional hour per day spent watching videos like Baby Einstein was associated with knowing 6 to 8 fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Lead researcher Zimmerman concluded there was no evidence of benefit and "some suggestion of harm."

In October 2009, Disney announced a refund program. Parents who had purchased Baby Einstein DVDs could claim $15.99 per disc, for up to four discs per household.

Researchers have a name for what the study measured: the video deficit. Infants under 18 months consistently learn less from screens than from identical content delivered by a live person. They can watch a human demonstrate something on a screen and not imitate it, then see the same action in person and copy it immediately. The brain circuits responsible for language at that age are calibrated for contingent response, which means a reply that arrives specifically because they did something. A classical music soundtrack over images of stuffed animals contains no such reply.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 6. MIT and Harvard researchers once gave 36 children small audio recorders to wear for two full days. The recorders tracked three things: how many words each child heard, how many words each child said, and how many times a child and an adult traded words back and forth.

The study, published in Psychological Science in 2018, found something that had been suspected but not directly measured in brains before. The number of words a child heard each day was a surprisingly weak predictor of brain development. The stronger predictor, by a significant margin, was conversational turns, the count of back-and-forth exchanges between a child and an adult. In children with more of those exchanges, a region called Broca's area, the part of the brain responsible for speech production and language processing, showed measurably higher activation. The effect was large enough to fully explain the income-related language gaps the researchers found between wealthier and less wealthy children. Lead author Rachel Romeo put the finding simply: talking with children, not just at them, was what built their brains.

The conversation is the key variable. What fills the hours between screens matters more to brain development than what the screens contain. A child who watches high-quality programming while also exchanging words regularly with a parent develops differently than one who watches the same programming in silence.

The complication is that the thing most likely to interrupt those exchanges is already in most parents' pockets. When parents use phones during time with their children, observational studies find verbal interactions drop by around 20 percent and non-verbal engagement by 30 percent. A single 30-second phone call during a learning moment, researchers found, was enough to prevent toddlers from retaining a new word they had just been taught.

A screen delivers thousands of words. The child receives them and gives nothing back. Zero conversational turns. Two hours of ordinary back-and-forth with a parent, doing nothing in particular, builds what no content on any screen can replicate.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 5. In 2018, researchers at the University of Colorado put preschoolers in a dim room they nicknamed the cave. Then, one evening, they turned on a bright light for an hour and measured what happened to the children's melatonin, the hormone that signals the body it's time to sleep.

Melatonin dropped by 88%. The study, published in Physiological Reports, was the first to directly measure how evening light affects melatonin production in young children. Adults in comparable research saw melatonin drop by around 39% from the same conditions. The senior author, Monique LeBourgeois, offered a structural explanation: children have larger pupils and clearer lenses than adults, meaning more light reaches their retinas. The same screen, in the same room, does roughly twice the hormonal damage in a 4-year-old as it does in a grown adult.

A 2022 follow-up from the same lab refined the finding further. Preschoolers needed only 5 to 10 lux of evening light, less than a dim nightlight, to suppress melatonin production by more than 75%. In 7 out of 10 children, levels still had not returned to baseline 50 minutes after the light source was removed.

Sleep is an active process. During sleep, the brain consolidates memory, processes emotional experiences, and restores the regulatory systems that govern attention, impulse control, and mood the following day. For children, whose regulatory systems are still under construction, the quality of each night's sleep directly shapes how the brain functions during the next one.

Researchers analyzing data from 690,747 children across 20 countries, spanning from 1905 to 2008, found that average sleep duration declined by roughly three-quarters of a minute per night per year across the full period. Across the complete century, that adds up to more than an hour of sleep per night lost compared to children at the start of the 20th century.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 4. In September 2019, the Federal Trade Commission announced that YouTube had "touted its popularity with children to prospective corporate clients" for years while telling regulators it was not a children's platform. The settlement was $170 million: the largest children's privacy penalty in US history.

The contradiction was the business model. YouTube earns money through advertising, and advertising revenue is tied to how long users stay on the platform. The recommendation algorithm, which decides what video plays next in an autoplay queue, learned one thing quickly from watching millions of children watch screens: emotionally intense content keeps children on longer. Rapid cuts, saturated colors, constant music, exaggerated sounds. Whatever held attention was promoted. Whatever lost it dropped out of recommendation queues before the next session started. The algorithm has no category for developmental value. It optimizes for one thing: whether a child finished the video.

Cocomelon is what that selection process produced. The channel launched in 2006, was rebranded in 2018, and by 2021 had been acquired for $3 billion. Today it has 200 million subscribers and 220 billion total views, making it the second most-viewed channel in YouTube history. Its scene changes average roughly every two seconds. No child development researcher reviewed the content before publication. No psychologist approved the pacing.

The shows Rogers, Santomero, and the original Sesame Street team built were designed by people who started from what a developing child actually needs. The algorithm that determines what children watch today was built around a different metric: watch time. More minutes on the platform. Those two starting points do not lead to the same place.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 3. Angela Santomero walked into the Nickelodeon research room in 1994 and noticed something strange: the children were talking back to the TV. Not all the time. Only when there was a pause. She stayed and watched it happen, on loop, for the rest of the session.

By then, most children's television had abandoned pauses entirely. Characters spoke quickly, asked nothing, and moved on before anyone could answer. Santomero, who had been studying child development research at Nickelodeon, thought that was a fundamental mistake. The data kept pointing to something the show's format ignored: preschoolers want to participate. Give them a beat of silence, and they fill it.

So she built silence into every question in Blue's Clues, the show she co-created with Todd Kessler and Traci Paige Johnson. A deliberate five-second pause after every prompt. Long enough for the child at home to think, then answer out loud. Uncomfortable for adults. For a 4-year-old, it felt like being spoken to directly.

The second decision was stranger still: air the same episode every day for five consecutive days, then start a new one the following week. Conventional wisdom said this would kill ratings. Researcher Daniel R. Anderson at the University of Massachusetts tested what actually happened. First-time viewers averaged 3.1 correct responses when tested on the content. By the fifth viewing, that had risen to 5.2. By day 5, children were shouting the answer before the host even asked the question. They had become measurably better at solving problems that had never appeared in the episode at all. Malcolm Gladwell, who attended a Blue's Clues research session while writing The Tipping Point, called it "maybe one of the stickiest television shows ever made."

Fred Rogers Productions later asked UCLA's Center for Scholars and Storytellers to survey 150 teenagers who had watched Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, the animated successor to Rogers' show, as young children. Nearly three quarters still clearly remembered specific emotional regulation strategies the show had taught them. One in five said they still use the calming techniques well into their teenage years.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 2. Your child's brain cannot calm itself down. Not at 2, not even at 4. Until around age 6, the part of the brain that regulates emotion is too undeveloped to manage it alone. Children need to borrow a calm nervous system from the nearest adult.

There's a name for this: co-regulation. When a caregiver speaks steadily, moves slowly, or simply stays calm nearby, the child's nervous system starts to synchronize with theirs. Both heart rate and stress hormones adjust. The calm transfers through the body.

A slow, predictable screen can do something similar. When the pacing is unhurried and nothing unexpected happens, the child's parasympathetic nervous system, the branch responsible for slowing heart rate and promoting recovery, stays active. Rogers understood this long before most people designing for children began thinking about it. His quiet voice, his predictable routine, his transitions so slow they'd bore most adults: all of it was calibrating a child's nervous system at the same time it entertained them.

Fast content activates the opposite branch. Rapid cuts, sudden sounds, and unpredictable movement trigger the sympathetic nervous system, the body's stress and threat response system. The child's body prepares to react. The trouble is, that reaction doesn't stop when the screen does. The nervous system stays activated after the show ends, which is why children so often melt down right after watching high-stimulation content: the alarm turned on, and nothing turned it off.

A study from Texas Tech University, published in the Journal of Children and Media, found that preschoolers who watched Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood scored measurably higher on empathy and emotion recognition, but only in households where parents watched alongside them and talked through what was happening on screen. Left to watch alone, the children's scores didn't move.

[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%.

[DR22 Ω 🪬🎭 @DejaRu22]

Grief is fundamentally, refusal to accept what happened.

The antidote to grief is acceptance.

Carl Jung said, "THERE IS NO HEALING. THERE IS ONLY LETTING GO." and you let go by accepting reality without wishing it were different.

THE BUDDHA failed in his earthly mission.
His goal was to put an end to suffering. His error was one of naive ambition.

Realising this, he understood, he cannot stop suffering. At best, he can only accept the inevitability of suffering and it’s place in the world.

It was ACCEPTANCE OF WHAT IS, that allowed him to become Enlightened. Do you understand?

[Danny Jones @JonesDanny]

The night after 9/11, Netanyahu was asked what the attack meant for Israel.

Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) explains why his answer is still one of the most revealing quotes of the entire era:

[CjS @stoicmook]

@spoopy_mia @silentgrind34 @mofo_refilwe @tebogstaT Gretzky said go where the puck is going, not where it is! LMAO

[CjS @stoicmook]

@spoopy_mia @silentgrind34 @mofo_refilwe @tebogstaT Also - Im open to going for slightly overweight women from now on. Theyre nicer and will treat me well. Theyre investements too, with the rise of Reta and other stuff they will become hot soon. Join me before its too late @silentgrind34 😂

[CjS @stoicmook]

@spoopy_mia @silentgrind34 @mofo_refilwe @tebogstaT HUGE difference, NEVER make fun of anybody's factory settings that they can't control or are immutable - penis size, height, facial structure etc. Body fat percentage is usually highly controllable

[Jøhnathan @Heavenly_Race_]

So, regarding my statement about IQ that broke the internet, here are a few clarifications, many of which will undoubtedly still be misunderstood.

The most common pushback falls into a few categories:

- “Look at this guy claiming he’s the smartest person on the internet.”

“I’m highly intelligent and I can talk to lower IQ people just fine.”

“If you can’t communicate with anyone below your level, that’s a skill issue.”

These are easily the funniest replies, and they prove my original point better than I ever could.

First, I never once claimed to be more intelligent than anyone. Not in the post, not anywhere. If that’s what you took away, you didn’t read what I actually wrote.

Second, I never said communication with lower IQ people is impossible. Basic small talk and first order topics work fine with most people.

What I said (very clearly) was that meaningful communication starts to break down at roughly a 20 point IQ gap.

That’s an observable reality backed by data.

Small talk? Sure. Complex philosophical systems, deep strategy, or multi step abstract reasoning? Highly unlikely.

Third, the “skill issue” crowd is the most entertaining. As if high IQ people have some moral obligation to constantly dumb themselves down to the lowest common denominator.

Look, as a Christian I believe in grace and patience. But I’d be lying if I said those qualities aren’t being drained out of me year after year.

What most people don’t understand (unless they’ve lived it) is the real cognitive and emotional drain this creates.

Yes, a higher IQ person can try to bridge the gap, but it often costs enormous time and energy, only for the other person to walk away having understood little or nothing.

Long story short, the replies and quote tweets to my original post have done more to validate my point than anything I could possibly write.

I would take the time and expand further, I could share all the various studies going back decades that all indicate this is a settled fact, but the truth is, everyone who was going to understand already does. And the ones who don’t. were never going to anyways.

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.