Rick Allen

Assistant Public Defender- Palmer, Alaska

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

Lindsey Graham and I had a complicated relationship.

Before Trump, we were friends. We traveled together on congressional trips around the world, including visiting Syrian refugee camps where we met children whose lives had been shattered by war. Those moments reminded us why public service mattered.

After Trump, we went in very different directions, and we eventually stopped speaking. I never hid those disagreements, and I won’t rewrite that history today.

But death has a way of putting things in perspective. I choose to remember the man I knew before our paths diverged—the one who cared deeply about America’s role in the world and wasn’t afraid to see suffering up close.

Rest in peace, Lindsey. My prayers are with his family and all who loved him.

[Mark Schlereth @markschlereth]

I love baseball… When people tell me they don’t like it because it’s slow I don’t lie to them and say no it’s fast. But that’s exactly what soccer fans try to sell me on just admit that the guys flop and it takes away from the game and they trot around for 90 minutes. All good.

[Rick Allen @907williwaw]

PK Sinbad? #nhl #stanleycup #vgkvscar

[Rick Allen @907williwaw]

The museum is a must when visiting Tulsa. Powerful.

[Robert F. Smith @RFS_Vista]

Today, we commemorate the Tulsa Race Massacre and the destruction of the Greenwood District, or Black Wall Street. This is personal to me: my ancestors left Oklahoma for Denver after the attacks. Remembering our history matters, and so does building a better future from it.

[Buck Sexton @BuckSexton]

Israel doesn't train dogs to rape Palestinian inmates. That's a vicious, stupid lie pushed by a slimy little propagandist. But this newest blood libel is meant to distract you from the latest released evidence- including video recordings that *no credible person says are fake* of Palestinians doing the most sadistic, grotesque things imaginable on Oct 7- raping corpses while they are mutilating and murdering them, lighting genitals on fire, shooting out the eyes and genitals of helpless victims, forcing husbands to watch as their wives and children are raped and murdered-

And Palestinians did this on the *orders of their elected government* with months of planning to do exactly what they did. It wasn't spontaneous. The monstrous cruelty, the sexual degradation was the point. They knew Oct 7 wasn't going to win a war, or gain any territory. It was just an orgy of Jew hate and violence. The Palestinians were mass murdering, child rapist terrorists who did all this and were gleeful about it. They made phone calls boasting to their family members.

Did anyone in the Hamas government express remorse or regret about any of this? Or anywhere in Gaza? Of course not. They ordered it. They delighted in the extreme pain and cruelty of the Oct 7 operation against Jews.

So now some Americans, including ones who claim to be conservative, are taking the side of Hamas and claiming this was a genocide?

What do these people really think Israel was supposed to do in response to Oct 7?
Fight an imaginary "gentle" war?
No response at all?
Give up?

Childish thinking. Absurd moral preening. War is hell, but Hamas brought that hell upon Gaza.

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

During what should be a quick nail trim, one groundhog seems to have already accepted its fate... while the other panics with every snip

[Rick Allen @907williwaw]

"People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands." This is why I like household chores. Dishes, laundry, mowing the lawn all give me great satisfaction

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Ken Burns @KenBurns]

We are announcing today that The American Revolution will stream for free in its entirety on all PBS platforms from May 25th through July 12. Hope you have a chance to watch, ideally with friends and family, as you think about our 250th anniversary this July 4th. https://t.co/c8fc6Sldj5

[gene ripon @hatemytimeline]

@skumWgmi no. it is not.
we just only here from the people who think it is.
the negativity in the US is strangling us.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

New newsletter: MODERN FATHERHOOD WOULD BE UNRECOGNIZABLE TO A 1950'S DAD

Compared to their Boomer parents, childcare time among Millennial dads has more than doubled.

Compared to their Silent Generation grandparents, it’s nearly quadrupled.

You will be hard-pressed to find any part of day-to-day modern life that has changed more in the last half-century than the way today’s parents—and fathers, in particular—spend their time.

The new American dad is more present and more exhausted—but also, more satisfied with life. What's behind this half-century transformation? Today's piece combines history, economic analysis, and gorgeous charts galore from @AzizSunderji

[YallNuckingFuts @YallNuckingFuts]

@Rep_Stansbury @JoJoFromJerz

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Trading Places (1983) stays brutally funny. The script hits that perfect mix of class satire and character chaos, and Murphy walks in like he’s been a movie star for decades. The film still plays with the kind of confidence most comedies dream about.

[U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell @SenMcConnell]

Clearly, King Charles wants America to know our allies, who came to our aid after 9/11, still look to us for leadership. On the importance of NATO and handing Russia a defeat in Ukraine, his message is crystal clear.

[Rory Cooper @rorycooper]

Ben Sasse is uniquely extraordinary…but if you watch that interview and wish we had more civically serious leaders like him, please understand that’s a choice. Voters can demand it.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Recalling the unity during World Wars, in Afghanistan, and pivotal invocation of Article 5 after 9/11, King Charles III issued a call to action before the U.S. Congress, stating: “That same unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people.”

[Rep. Melanie Stansbury @Rep_Stansbury]

Imagine getting in a time machine and going back to 1776 and telling the Founding Fathers that the King would one day be reminding America about the importance of democracy and our checks and balances. That is the timeline we’re living in.

[Kim R. Holmes @kimsmithholmes]

A lot of people are asking why more politicians are not like Ben Sasse.

Because voters will not elect them, that’s why. They may say they care about character, but most don’t vote that way.

Instead they vote party line, ideology, self-interest, or out of pique against a perceived enemy.

How can we expect our leaders to embody higher levels of virtue if a majority of voters don’t make personal character a red line?

It looks like we get the leaders we deserve.

[Beth Bourne @bourne_beth2345]

🚨🚨HEARTBREAKING: Male athlete, Antonio “Alice” Birrueta from Santa Maria High School, won the Girls 800m Varsity dash at yesterday’s Santa Barbara County Championship track and field meet.

Amaya Uvalle of Righetti High School (in the purple uniform), the true winner, ran an excellent time of 2:17:56.

Birrueta is another victim of California’s state-sanctioned child abuse as he was gr*omed/programmed to believe he could grow up to be woman.

@CIFState

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Prince Harry:

The question is no longer whether Ukraine will stand. You have already answered that. The question is: Will the rest of the world match your resolve?

Because one day soon, this war will end. And history will not ask what we said — it will ask what we did. Who acted, who stepped forward, and who chose courage over caution.

Ukraine has already given its answer. Now is the time for the rest of us to give ours.

Thank you. Slava Ukraini!

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

This man exhibits the supreme confidence of someone who has no idea that he has no idea what he's talking about