🌺Gee-Eff-Gee🌺

Northern Minnesotan/Non-Profit Development/MN Politico/cooking+outdoors+GIFs+yoga+video games+Dog Mom 🐶(she/her) tweets≠endorsements

[🌺Gee-Eff-Gee🌺 @ThisIsGFG]

Hi #GreenCheese @KAXE here is our puppy, Coya. She is named after the first woman elected to Congress from Minnesota!

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

It is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person. Meeting this need not only alleviates suffering but also addresses underlying causes of geopolitical instability. Indeed, food security is an essential component of global and integral security. https://t.co/DgkM9RegJ7

[gremlin @queerlilgremlin]

“almost four” sure sounds like he doesn’t consider the fetus she’s pregnant with to be a real person yet

weird

[project hail rusty 🍉 @alittlevillainy]

every single day just feels like this image now

[sophia @charliyuri]

she was being serious

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

[Elibro @AlabroElisha]

A beautiful and powerful return to the heart of the Mandatum tradition.

Pope Leo XIV kneeling at the Lateran Basilica to wash and kiss the feet of 12 Roman priests (most of them ordained by him just last year) is a striking image of priestly fraternity, humility, and service—exactly as Jesus modeled it for His apostles on the night He instituted the Eucharist and the priesthood.

It has been over a decade since a pope last did this in that classic form at his own cathedral as Bishop of Rome. This gesture quietly but firmly reconnects the rite to its deep liturgical and theological roots: the intimate bond between the altar, the priesthood, and self-giving love.

In a world that often confuses power with domination, seeing the Successor of Peter on his knees reminds us that true greatness in the Church is found in lowering ourselves to serve. Simple, ancient, and profoundly counter-cultural.

A fitting start to the Triduum.

[Trey Ferguson @PastorTrey05]

Congrats, and ima let you finish, but two consecutive Popes have said this guy is bad at Catholicism.

That’s a CRAZY batting average for a new Catholic.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The research behind this is wild. If you played Pokémon as a kid, you have a tiny region in your brain that exists only because of Pokémon. Not a metaphor. Stanford put people in brain scanners and found it.

The study was published in Nature Human Behavior in 2019. They scanned 11 adults who grew up glued to their Game Boys and 11 who never played. When they showed both groups images of the original 151, the players' brains lit up in one specific spot every time. Same spot across all 11 people. The non-players showed zero response.

That spot is a little fold in the back of your brain that normally processes things like animal shapes and cartoon faces. In the Pokémon players, a chunk of it had been permanently reassigned. Their brains carved out a Pokémon department sometime around age 6 or 7 and just never took it down.

And the reason it ended up in the same place in everyone's brain comes down to the Game Boy itself. The screen was 2.6 inches. Every kid held it at roughly the same distance. So those 151 characters hit the exact same patch of each kid's retina, thousands of times, during the years when the brain is still soft enough to reorganize itself. Where an image hits your retina in childhood is what tells your brain where to build the wiring.

Reading works the same way. Humans invented writing about 5,000 years ago. There's zero evolutionary reason for a brain region dedicated to recognizing words. But every person who learns to read grows one, roughly the size of a dime, in the same part of the brain.

Brain-imaging research from 2018 actually watched it appear in children's heads as they learned their letters. It grew by quietly taking over nearby tissue that wasn't doing much yet. Stanford published a follow-up this year showing this region is way smaller or missing entirely in kids with dyslexia, and that 8 weeks of intense reading practice physically grew it back.

London taxi drivers show the same thing in a completely different part of the brain. Brain scans from a 2000 study found the region that stores mental maps had physically expanded, and the longer they'd been driving, the bigger it got. These drivers spend 3 to 4 years memorizing 25,000 streets before they get licensed. About half wash out.

The common thread is childhood. Harvard researchers trained young monkeys to recognize new shapes and they developed brand-new brain regions in predictable locations. Adult monkeys trained on the same shapes never got those structural changes. The young brain wires itself in a way the adult brain cannot replicate.

If you're wondering whether a Pokémon patch in your brain means you lost something else, no. The region sits alongside your normal visual processing areas, not on top of them. Your brain has hundreds of millions of neurons in that zone alone. The lead author noted that every participant in the study had gone on to earn a PhD.

[Clifton Duncan @cliftonaduncan]

Teachers are quitting at record rates and headlines warn that younger generations aren't reading.

Meanwhile this young man with tens of millions of fans is working to educate himself in front of the world.

This deserves praise, not mockery.

[Hasty @hastyttv]

Found a lawsuit for you @ConcernedApe

[el ✴︎˚｡⋆🍈 @thesubwaymp3]

chappell apple girl of all time

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. #Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself. Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.
https://t.co/LZ9hxddaS1

[cowboy postbop @cowboy_postbop]

this remains one of my favorite exchanges in all of TV. Peggy and Roger only have a few scenes together throughout the show but every one is golden.

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

I feel like I'm losing my mind over this OU thing. The assignment said to write something that proves you did the reading, which is what my 4th grade teacher said to write for our book reports. This had no business being a university assignment and she still couldn't do it.

[Alexander Thatcher @ThatchEffendi]

The core underlying belief at the heart of all modern right-wing political thought today is that advertisements from the 50s-90s were totally real and that if we are realy, really cruel and try really really really hard we can live in advertisements from the 50s-90s

[Republican Accountability @AccountableGOP]

Megyn Kelly in 2018: " There's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old."

Megyn Kelly today: "Jeffrey Epstein…was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."

[Melvin Carter @melvincarter3]

It still sounds nice.

Good luck, Rep. Her.

[Vatican News @VaticanNews]

Pope Leo has called for “deep reflection” on the treatment of migrants in the United States.

Speaking to journalists in Castel Gandolfo, just outside Rome, the Pope said that “many people who have lived for years and years” in the US, “never causing problems”, are “deeply affected” by the current situation.

The Pope was responding to a question from a journalist concerning the fact that Catholic migrants detained in Chicago have been denied access to Holy Communion. He went on to stress the importance of protecting the “spiritual rights” of migrant detainees.

https://t.co/PBZF3aCnSg

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

BREAKING: In response to ICE's refusal to allow detained migrants to receive the Eucharist, Pope Leo XIV calls on President Trump and Vice President Vance to respect the dignity and religious liberty of migrants in the United States.

“The authorities must allow pastoral workers to assist with the needs of these people. Many times they have been separated from their families and no one knows what happens.”