Terri

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Nobody has ever made the dark feel as real as old Disney did.

In these films the night isn't an absence of light. It's a color, and someone mixed it by hand…

Disney had its own paint laboratory, built by a woman named Mary Weiser, the first of its kind in animation. Its job was to invent shades that did not exist yet. In the early thirties, when the studio was still making shorts, there were around eighty shades on the shelves. By the time they finished Snow White there were fifteen hundred.

Every one of them went on by hand, cel by cel, and each cel needed hours to dry before it could be photographed.

The Ink and Paint department was almost entirely women. According to the Walt Disney Family Museum, the paints were sometimes named after them, and to have a color carry your name was considered an honour.

So the dark of Bambi's forest, the lamplight in Geppetto's workshop, the blue at Cinderella's attic window: none of it is a filter or a setting or a dimmer turned down. Each is a specific colour that a specific person mixed in a jar, and some of those jars had her name on the label.

That is why these scenes still feel more alive than anything made since. We went from hands, to computers, to AI, and at every step there is a little less of the person left in it…

The author Joanna Maciejewska said it better than anyone: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

[Royally Sage @sage1411]

My brother posts this every year in the family chat on the 4th. Still hilarious.

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.?

Because we gave them that L in 1776.

[Shahriq Khan @RealShahriqKhan]

You know what shook me when I was Muslim?

The story of Hosea. God tells a prophet to marry a woman He knows will betray him.

She does. She runs to other men. She ends up enslaved, sold, used up, worthless to the world.

And God tells Hosea to go BUY HER BACK.

To pay money for his own wife who cheated on him, and love her again. Hosea 3.

I thought it was the most humiliating command in the Bible. Why would any man do that?

Then I realized I was the wife.

I gave my heart to everything but God. I chased other masters. I sold myself cheap. I made myself worthless.

And God looked at me, the betrayer, and didn’t say “you’re not worth it.”

He said, “Name the price. I’m buying her back.”

That’s the Gospel. God doesn’t wait for the unfaithful to come crawling back clean.

He pays to redeem them while they’re still dirty.

Islam told me to make myself worthy of God.

Hosea showed me a God who pays to redeem the unworthy.

The cross was Him naming the price.

Praise the Lord.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

My mother still cries about it.

Forty years later, she'll be sitting at the table, and her eyes will fill, and she says the same words she's said my whole life: "We had everything. We lost it all. And we couldn't give you children anything."

Mom, I have told you a thousand times — and I will tell you a thousand more. You gave me the greatest gift a parent can ever give a child. You gave me America. Nothing else matters. Nothing else even comes close.

Let me tell you what she means.
In Iran, we did have everything. My father spent thirty years helping build a nation — its cities, its schools, its roads, its hospitals. We belonged to a Jewish community that had lived on Persian soil for 2,700 years. We had a home, a history, a name that meant something.
And then, almost overnight, we had a target on our backs. Bullets cracked over our roof. Cars burned in our street. My father became a hunted man for two unforgivable crimes: he had served his country, and he was a Jew.

So he did the only thing a father can do. He sold everything we owned for whatever he could get, gathered his wife, his mother, and his four little boys, and he ran. Thirty years of a man's life's work — surrendered at the door, in exchange for our lives.

We were the lucky ones. That community was once a hundred thousand souls. Most never got out with what we did. Some never got out at all.

We carried away only what no regime could confiscate — our faith, our language, our poetry, and each other. And after a few years finding our footing, we came here. To America. To the one country on earth that looked at a family fleeing a regime that hated it… and opened its arms anyway.

We arrived with empty hands. And that is the wound my mother has never let go of — that after all they'd had, they gave us nothing.

But Mom, you don't understand what you gave me.

You gave me a country where I could pray out loud without fear. Where I could speak my mind. Where a penniless refugee kid could become a physician, a scientist, an author — where the only ceiling was how hard I was willing to work. You didn't hand me an inheritance. You handed me something no fortune in Iran could ever have bought: the freedom to build a life without looking over my shoulder.

That is a love only an exile understands. Not the calm, comfortable patriotism of someone born into safety — but the fierce, protective, almost desperate love of someone who has watched a homeland turn on its own people and knows, in his bones, how quickly it can all be taken away.

And that is exactly why I will never stay silent.

When you have watched a revolution promise heaven and deliver a prison — when you've seen radical Islamists and the intoxicating lies of socialism hollow out a great nation from the inside until it devours its own children — you do not take a single hour of American freedom for granted. And you carry one holy fear: watching it happen again.

I did not flee that fire to sit quietly while anyone strikes the same match under the country that saved my family. You do not escape the thing that destroyed your first home only to welcome it into your second. I love America too much — and I remember far too much — to let that happen without a fight.

So I spend my life trying to be worthy of the gift. Through medicine. Through science. Through my words. By defending the freedoms that saved us — free speech, free thought, the God-given right to choose — with everything I have. This country once invested in me with no expectation of return, only trust. I have been repaying that trust every day since, and I will until my last breath.

So this is my answer, Mom.

You did not send me into the world with empty hands. You placed in them the freest, most generous, most extraordinary nation in the history of mankind.

You gave me America.

And I will spend the rest of my life proving it was more than enough.
Happy 250th Birthday. 🇺🇸

God bless the United States of America. 🗽

#ModehAni

[History With Jacob @HistoryWJacob]

The vote that would create the United States was deadlocked, and the man who could break the tie was eighty miles away, dying of cancer, on the wrong side of a thunderstorm.

His name was Caesar Rodney. On the first of July 1776, while Congress argued itself toward independence in Philadelphia, he was stuck back in Delaware. He was tamping down Loyalist trouble, in constant pain from the cancer eating at his face and fighting for breath due to his asthma.

Then the letter came. Delaware's two delegates in Congress were split. One for independence, one against. Without a tiebreaker, the colonies would not stand united. And a divided front was exactly what the Crown was counting on.

He did not hesitate. He climbed onto his horse near midnight and rode straight into the storm. Lightning split the sky. The roads turned to sludge. A journey that normally took two days but he made it in eighteen hours. He stopped only to change horses, soaked with every mile.

He reached Independence Hall on the morning of July 2 just as the vote was called, still in his boots and spurs. Caked in mud. Thomas McKean never forgot the sight of him standing in the doorway.

Rodney walked in and cast his vote for independence. It broke Delaware's tie, and with that, not a single colony stood against the break from Britain.

On this day, 250 years ago, a dying man rode all night through a storm so America could be born.

America 250 🇺🇸

[New York Post @nypost]

Iran has arrested more than 3,000 citizens for 'collaborating with the enemy' during war https://t.co/ggZH122vrR

[Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley]

This is how the regime treats the Iranian people. Believe them when they say “Death to America.”

No handshake will change who they are or what they believe.

[Matthew Cappucci @MatthewCappucci]

This is why we tell folks to NEVER seek shelter inside a vehicle.

This car near Effingham, Illinois was thrown into a fields, rolled and impaled.

As a last resort, seek shelter inside a ditch and cover your head — but never stay inside the car.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Old shows like Little Bear were actually better for your kid's brain, and scientists have the test scores to prove it.

Researchers at the University of Virginia took 60 four-year-olds and split them three ways. One group watched SpongeBob, which cuts to a new scene every 11 seconds. One watched a calm show that changed scenes twice a minute. One just colored with markers.

Nine minutes. Then every kid took the same battery of focus and self-control tests.

The SpongeBob kids tanked. Planning, memory, impulse control, all measurably worse than both other groups. The calm-show kids scored the same as the kids who did nothing but draw.

Nine minutes of fast cartoon. That was the whole dose.

Here is the mechanism. A small child's brain has a tiny buffer. Eleven-second cuts stacked with cartoon physics that break every real-world rule jam that buffer faster than the kid can empty it. They leave the screen already overloaded. Little Bear held one watercolor scene long enough for a four-year-old to keep up.

The old shows were built to match the speed of a child's mind. The new ones are built to capture it. CoComelon cuts every one to three seconds for the same reason a casino has no clocks: so you never look away.

That calm you remember was the one speed a developing brain could actually follow. Everything since has been built to outrun it.

[Joel Richardson @Joel7Richardson]

“I suggested to Israel to let Syria take care of Hezbollah. Because to be honest with you, I think they’d do a better job of doing it. [Sharaa] is very capable. And he’s been very good for me... If Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job. Syria will do the job." —President Donald Trump

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

For years, Republicans have pointed out money is fungible and any dollar given to Planned Parenthood by the government that cannot be used for abortion offsets money spent on abortions.

Now the GOP will argue humanitarian money to Iran cannot be used for terror. Okay, but what about the other money now freed up?

[Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D. @neoavatara]

Money is fungible. Never forget it.

It does not matter where the IRGC terrorists get their money from.

When they get it, they will start killing innocents with it.

Its really that simple.

[The Emmaus Wire @EmmausWire]

Some of those "reconstruction" funds worth $300 billion are going straight to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

Iranian Regime’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf:

“Everything we sought to achieve through military action was secured several times over at the negotiating table, in a way that cannot even be compared.”

This is the man who was seen burning the American Flag in Iranian parliament in videos circulating.

He’s celebrating this deal.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

Wow. Trump allows the Iranian Regime to retain its Ballistic Missile Program:

“They hurt a little location but they dont blow up the planet"

The little location is Israel. Which means that the entire Middle Eastern Conflict will reignite again.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Trump says it's "a little bit unfair" to tell Iran they can't have missiles.

It's really tough to hear that as an Israeli who literally saw these deadly missiles above me with my own eyes.

I can't believe I'm hearing this.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

Vance spent the last 2 days running around repeatedly claiming that the regime wouldn’t get sanction relief if they continued to sponsor terror proxies (despite that being nowhere in the MoU text).

All while the regime publicly says they will use the money from the deal in the same exact way they’ve always used it.

[The Emmaus Wire @EmmausWire]

With all due respect, there are 70+ million Iranians who would disagree with this statement.

[Joel Richardson @Joel7Richardson]

$400 billion