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.
Packing thousands of straws together basically creates a low-tech pixel screen.
Each straw acts as an independent light pathway, perfectly mimicking how data channels work.
I love that we’re the new Rome. Peace with Persia in the afternoon and a gladiator fight in the evening, all on the Emperor’s birthday. Another 1,000 years.
I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is.
University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages.
Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures.
There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them.
If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything.
Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings:
Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them.
Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.
Sometimes I joke that the government doesn’t want you to learn Latin because somewhere out there is an unpublished manuscript containing the secrets of the universe.
Who knows?
But the real reason is probably much simpler: a people without roots are easier to control.
>Plot centers entirely around fighting extreme government taxation and overreach
>The Sheriff of Nottingham literally collects taxes from the church poor box
>Friar Tuck gets so fed up with the state disrespecting the Church that he physically throws hands with the Sheriff
>Casts the Crusades in a positive light
>Male protagonist who risks his life for his people
>Unapologetically traditional romance with Maid Marian without any modern subversion
>Climax is literally a raid to break political prisoners out of a corrupt jail
>Story resolves when the rightful, divinely-appointed monarch returns from the Holy Land to crush the corrupt politicians
>Ends with a beautiful church wedding and a happily ever after
We need to make Kid's stories based again
According to Saxo Grammaticus, in medieval Danish law when a foreigner slew a Dane, two foreigners must be put to death.
Disproportionate penalty was seen as justice because foreigners lacked the same kinship and legal protections (weregild) that Danes enjoyed, so the society mandated a harsher, collective penalty for them. They believed rulers owed their people an uncompromising deterrent to prevent outsiders from disturbing the peace or assaulting native Danes.
Something to think about.
Le dije a mi hijo: —¿Te vas a casar con la mujer que yo elija?
Él dijo: —¡NO!
Le dije: —Es la hija de Bill Gates.
Mi hijo dijo: —OK.
Llamé a Bill Gates y le dije: —Quiero que tu hija se case con mi hijo.
Bill Gates dijo: —¡NO!
Le dije a Bill Gates: —Mi hijo es el CEO del Banco Mundial.
Bill Gates dijo: —OK.
Llamé al presidente del Banco Mundial y le pregunté si podía convertir a mi hijo en CEO del Banco Mundial.
Él dijo: —¡NO!
Le dije: —Mi hijo es yerno de Bill Gates.
Él dijo: —OK.
Así es exactamente cómo funciona la política...
⚠️ In 2000, Inés Ramírez Pérez from Mexico delivered a healthy baby boy by slicing open her own stomach with a kitchen knife after 12 hours of agonizing labor.
In doing so, she became the only woman in medical history to successfully perform a self-cesarean.
With no electricity or running water, and the nearest hospital 12 miles away, Inés felt she had no other option.
Her previous child had been a stillbirth, so Inés was determined not to let it happen again.
She downed some hard liqor, sliced open her stomach, pulled out her baby and then cut the umbilical cord.
Both mother and baby survived without serious injury… just a scar of honor for Inés for her heroic act ❤️
Avui fa 100 anys de la mort del mestre Antoni Gaudí. I a ‘Les tres bessones i Gaudí’, la seva mort es representa poèticament: en lloc de ser atropellat per un tramvia, se’l veu pujant-hi i retrobant-se amb el seu amor de joventut.
Pell de gallina. Sempre referents.
La visita del Papa ha destapado muchas diferencias entre Madrid y Barcelona.
En Barna: Castellers, el Virolai, coros, catalán...en fin, arraigo, tradiciones y cultura propia.
En Madrid, todo espectáculo sin tradición ni arraigo madrileño propio. Un batiburrillo donde aparecen flamencas, danzas contemporáneas, hippies...
Es contra-intuitivo porque BCN es la meca de lo posmo/Cosmopaleto y Madrid es como más castizo.
Pero creo que el Papa logra despertar inconscientes dormidos frente al escaparate que habitualmente muestran ambas ciudades hacia afuera. Una gran parte de Madrid aspira a ser Londres/Miami. Y una parte de BCN quiere seguir siendo esa ciudad portuaria, ruda pero con tradiciones catalanas muy arraigadas.
My roommate accidentally convinced our entire apartment building that he was a government agent because he didn’t know how to end conversations normally.
It started because he ordered a shredder.
That’s it.
Just a regular office shredder from Amazon.
But the delivery guy asked,
“What do you need this for?”
And instead of saying “old bank statements” like a civilian, my roommate pauses for two full seconds and goes,
“Can’t really discuss that.”
Why would you say that.
Now the delivery guy looks nervous.
My roommate notices the nervousness.
And instead of correcting himself, he doubles down because apparently social anxiety turns him into a Batman villain.
He leans closer and says:
“Appreciate your discretion.”
The delivery guy left like he had just transported nuclear launch codes.
After that, weird things started happening.
Neighbors became oddly respectful.
People stopped asking him dumb small-talk questions in the elevator.
One old man saluted him once.
At first we thought it was coincidence.
Then our downstairs neighbor knocks on our door and quietly asks,
“Are we safe?”
My roommate, who is eating cereal at the time, just stares at him and says:
“For now.”
FOR NOW???
The neighbor looked like he was about to evacuate his family immediately.
Turns out the delivery guy had apparently told multiple people in the building that “federal people” were living on the third floor.
And honestly my roommate’s lifestyle was NOT helping.
He leaves the apartment at random hours.
Owns three identical black jackets.
Rarely explains where he’s going.
Has terrible posture but walks fast enough to seem important.
One time he came home carrying a locked briefcase.
Do you know what was inside?
A sandwich.
But nobody else knew that.
The paranoia escalated when building management installed new security cameras and my roommate casually muttered,
“About time.”
Now everybody thinks he requested surveillance upgrades.
Then came the incident with Apartment 4B.
There was a huge screaming argument downstairs around midnight.
Doors slamming.
People yelling.
Somebody crying.
The whole building could hear it.
My roommate walks into the hallway, listens for ten seconds, then calmly says:
“They’re moving earlier than expected.”
EARLIER THAN WHAT??
A woman across the hall literally gasped.
The next morning 4B had moved out unexpectedly because apparently they were already behind on rent and the fight ended the relationship.
But now the building believes my roommate orchestrated a covert extraction.
People started treating him like some kind of undercover protector.
Neighbors would randomly update him on “suspicious activity.”
One guy whispered:
“There’s a blue Honda that keeps circling the block.”
My roommate nodded and wrote something down.
Do you know what he wrote?
“Buy oat milk.”
But the guy saw the note-taking and immediately went,
“Knew it.”
Then management offered him a free parking spot “for operational convenience.”
HE TOOK IT.
At this point I asked him why he kept feeding the delusion instead of stopping it.
And he said something I’ll never forget:
“It’s gone too far to explain naturally.”
Which somehow made him sound EVEN MORE like a spy.
Then things became catastrophic.
A package got delivered to the wrong apartment and went missing.
Management called a building meeting about “recent security concerns.”
In the middle of the meeting, somebody actually turned toward my roommate and asked:
“What do you think we should do?”
This idiot crosses his arms and says:
“Keep communication limited. Don’t panic.”
The room nodded collectively.
I was watching a man fail upward into the CIA.
Then an actual police officer showed up later that week because somebody reported “possible federal surveillance activity.”
We thought the game was over.
But when the officer knocked on our door, my roommate opened it halfway, looked at the badge, and sighed like he was disappointed.