If you compare the academic outcomes of pre-pandemic in-person learning to mid-pandemic virtual learning and attribute the gap to VIRTUAL rather than THE PANDEMIC, you are engaging in a fundamental correlation vs causation error that ignores 60 years of peer-reviewed research.

RT @MKaylaUltra: This episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia aired in 2020 during peak woke

Are you telling me my tax dollars are being sent to rebuild all the shit that Pete Hegseth blew up also with my tax dollars

Posted by former US Congressman @AdamKinzinger on Facebook. Beautifully written, in both form and substance: Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news? I know I am. We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good. Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green. For today's Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer. The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer. What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can't stop thinking about. It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find. They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them. The welcome only got bigger from there. The University of Kansas, the state's flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria's national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment. These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country's song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren't sure what to do with themselves. Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago. But it's not just Lawrence. This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect. The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team's red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month. There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person. And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country's national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don't know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came. That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else's song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember. That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday. — Adam

Hot take but I don’t think politicians should be allowed to cancel events hosted by their primary challengers. Pretty clear abuse of power.

Leonardo da Vinci sketched a bridge that gets stronger under weight. Pull one plank, and it collapses in a second. Both features were designed on purpose, for a warlord who needed to cross rivers and then deny them to enemies. The warlord was Cesare Borgia. In 1502, Borgia appointed the fifty-year-old Leonardo as his senior military architect and general engineer, handing him authority over every fortification in the Papal States. Borgia was the model Niccolò Machiavelli used for "The Prince," his guide on how rulers seize and hold power through force, cunning, and fear. His tactical problem was rivers. Italian campaigns meant constantly crossing waterways with enemies on both flanks, and any bridge left standing was a bridge the enemy could use to follow. The design holds together without fasteners, held by wood pressing against wood and the grip between surfaces as weight pushes down. Wooden beams are laid in a crisscross pattern, each wedging against the others where they cross. Press down and the beams squeeze tighter. The harder they squeeze, the more stable it gets. An army crossing makes the bridge stronger with every soldier. The collapse feature is equally precise. Each beam holds every other beam in balance through the forces pressing on it. Remove one, and you break that balance across all of them at once. The entire structure comes apart in a single pull. Borgia's troops could cross a river, pull one plank from the far bank, and leave enemies staring at scattered timber. The instant disassembly was a deliberate security feature. The sketch lives in the Codex Atlanticus, da Vinci's personal engineering notebook, held today at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. He never built it in his lifetime. Five centuries later, anyone with a pile of logs can prove his geometry was right.

I know comparing modern society to Idiocracy is really played out but man

He was Courtside when The Knicks only won 10 games, he’s one of the only Celebs who pays for their Knicks tickets because him & Dolan hate each other, he doesn’t even use The Celebrity entrance at MSG Spike Lee’s love for The Knicks is the purest thing in this world, he deserves

If you made a dollar a sec you’d have $1 million in 12 days, you’d have $1 billion in 32yrs & $1 trillion in 31,710yrs or 5X longer than human civilization. New rightwing thing is acting like there’s an incremental difference between 5X longer than human civilization and 12 days

Dude he literally running New York like the average joe in a movie who gets elected into office as a gag and then fixes everything simply because he is not a politician and an earnest regular guy.

Stanford graduates chant "Free Palestine" waving Palestinian flags as they walk out on Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai as he beings his commencement speech. Absolutely epic.

Kate was a spokeswoman for John Edwards in 2008, and stayed on to the end after the Enquirer broke that he was cheating on his cancer stricken wife with a campaign videographer, fathering her child, and as we later learned committed 6 campaign finance felonies to cover it up.

Bloomberg is owned by the world's 18th richest man. Billionaires emit more carbon in one hour than a poor person does in a lifetime. This is propaganda.

(at the dentist) u forgot to ask but i am sexually active

I’m actually crying this is so fkn funny

There are towns in Israel named after Jews who put bombs in markets. Next argument.

The worst part is him saying the strike on the elementary school in Minab (that killed 168 schoolchildren and teachers) "is a use case that doesn't even violate our red lines."

Eating in Mexico coming from England or Scotland has got to be a transcendent experience. Like seeing colors for the first time

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer caught on a hot mic talking about the controversial Al data center being built despite overwhelming opposition: "We're used to people saying 'f*ck no!', and then doing it anyway."

RT @lunwi75: Remember when Musk challenged the World Food Program to explain how he could solve world hunger with just $6 billion, they did…

“Dear migrants, before I say any other word to you, I want to bow before your dignity. “You are not numbers or case files. “You are people — with a family and a home left behind, with dreams that no one has the right to scorn.” — Pope Leo XIV