Aeneus

Healthcare provider. Father. Husband.

Can't hurt me

#giletsblancssante

[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.

[Yasmina @yasminalombaert]

Massive respect to Szabolcs Panyi for uncovering what we all suspected: the Orbán regime isn’t just "Russia-friendly"—it’s an active subcontractor for Putin’s interference in European democracy.

This leaked transcript from 2020 is a disgrace. It shows Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó literally begging Sergey Lavrov to help the Slovak "Social Democrats" (Smer) win their election.

While pretending to be "conservatives," they’d rather back a nominal leftist in Bratislava as long as he bows to the Kremlin.
It’s a coordinated assault on Central European stability.
If you still believe Orbán fights for "Hungarian interests”, you’re missing the fact that those interests now seem to be dictated from Moscow.

Share this. Don’t let them bury the truth. 🇭🇺🇪🇺

Transcript:
“14.02.2020

PS: Hello Sergey, Peter here. Thank you for talking to me. As I understand you are in Munich, at the conference, right?

SL: Yes, I am in Munich.

PS: I don’t want to bother you but the Prime Minister asked me to do it, because we have kinda big plea for you. As you know then there are elections coming up in Slovakia 29.02 and it is of key importance to us that the coalition there would continue. I understand it may sound strange coming from Hungarian conservatives but we are hoping for social democrats since they are the only rational force in Slovak political landscape and the only ones who are acting without foreign interference. All others are basically funded by Soros. If the opposition wins then it would be a tragedy for the Central European cooperation. It is also important that the speaker Danko’s Slovak National Party would cross the 5% threshold. We hope they manage it but the only hope for the coalition to continue is when the ruling party wins elections. The prime minister Pellegrini was here yesterday and he told us that if your prime minister would host him even for half an hour it would be of great help for winning the elections. He told us it is way more important for their society than a visit to Washington. So he asked us to ask you, and we also want to ask it ourselves, if such thing could be organized that your PM would host Slovak PM in Moscow somewhere in February...

SL: It’s quite a plea but I’ll pass it on to PM.

PS: I understand. It would be great if you’d manage to organize it. Pellegrini asked for our help in that regard since he knows we have good relations and that our presidents also have good personal relations. And he trusted us in this matter.

SL: Peter, I will pass this plea on today and will be in contact as soon as I have any updates.

PS: Thank you. And let me emphasize it once more how important it is for us that the coalition in Slovakia continues. If they can’t continue then there is no hope for pragmatic cooperation in Central Europe and we would lose a lot.

SL: I understand.

PS: You have no idea how grateful I am that we are having this conversation. It is a sign of friendship.

SL: Any time, my friend. All the best.”

[Masih Alinejad 🏳️ @AlinejadMasih]

This should have been on the front page of The New York Times.
I speak to students in America and most have no idea that more than 30,000 Iranians were killed for protesting and demanding freedom.
No names. No faces. No coverage. This silence kills me.💔

Thank you, Australia.

[Raphael Glucksmann @rglucks1]

La gauche républicaine et démocratique gagnera sans se compromettre.

Plus: elle ne gagnera que si elle ne se compromet pas.

Elle sera la digue face à l’extreme-droite si elle ne renie pas ses principes et fait preuve de courage.

Pas de fusion avec LFI pour @placepublique_

[Xavier Tytelman @PeurAvion]

À Kyiv ce matin, où un drone Shahed a été abattu, avec un débris tombé directement sur place Maïdan... Presque 100% d'interception sur les Shaheds cette nuit...

[Spencer Althouse @SpencerAlthouse]

this was the most important Oscar speech of the night tbh

"Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. What we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small, little acts of complicity: when we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don't say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it, we all face a moral choice. But luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think."

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

Isn't it ironic that many Brits voted for Brexit because they wanted immigration to go down?

How did this happen?

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

God, I simply love Paris

[Tom Antonov @Tom_Antonov]

The French soldier ADC Arnaud Frion killed last night in Iraq in a drone attack, had participated in the rescue and evacuation of U.S. special forces who had fallen into a deadly ambush in Tongo Tongo, Niger, in 2017 (4 KIA, 2 WIA). 🇫🇷🇺🇸

[Ministère de l'Intérieur @Interieur_Gouv]

🇫🇷 Dans chacune des 34 875 communes communes françaises, 1 maire sera élu à l'issue des élections #Municipales2026.

Pour connaître les candidats de votre ville et leurs programmes, rendez-vous sur ⤵️

https://t.co/BAO5Atz7kL

[Malcolm Nance @MalcolmNance]

Look folks, reality can sometimes be hard to accept.

We all want freedom for Iran. The regime was a horrible, nasty pack of religious zealots for whom terrorism & murder was always the first option. Their revolution started by killing 400 people in a theater with arson & chained exit doors. They sent thousand of kids to their deaths with toy keys around their necks promising entry to heaven if they just walk in to Iraqi minefields.

I’ve tracked IRGC terrorism across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria & Yemen and even fought them in the PG, They almost killed me in 1988. The Islamic regime needed/still needs to be destroyed … that said:

People are getting upset with why I assess this war will likely fail to topple the regime.

Because it is a fantasy based in Trump’s head using lethal tools we prepared for 47 years for the right moment. That moment likely has passed.

Trump has no idea what he’s doing. Because he has contempt for the people who know what they’re doing & the history of what came before him.

If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires then Iran is the funeral home of empires. It dresses you up and lays you into the coffin neatly. Then closes the lid.

Trump cannot understand why Iran hasn’t surrendered … “Lookit all them bombs,” he shouts “They should all love Trump!”

That’s it. That’s the Iran-War strategy. He does not care about the people of Iran. It a score settling grudge match egged on by Netanyahu’s 40 years of promises that war will change the regime if we just drop enough bombs & assassinate its leaders.

So If you want to live in a fantasy world where we are suddenly being greeted as liberators by the 93 million Iranians … feel free.

You are now set up for earth shattering disappointment.

You have to account for the fact that Trump could have attacked in support of the protesters in January. He didn’t & he let them be killed. He was completely indifferent. The 30k dead were a one-day talking point.

Right now, none of these attacks will liberate Iran without a populist uprising or invading ground forces. Worse case is a sectarian Civil war. If that happens the only outcome is that it will kill a lot of people, splinter the country & take down the global economy. Trump will sleep soundly & demand he be made Ayatollah.

This is literally his mental illness masked as foreign policy

This war may give some Iranians hope but it’s a false one. Gird for a horrible chain of dramatic events but rest assured Trump doesn’t care about the people of Iran.

He only want its oil. He said so.

I’m sorry folks, but my job is to deliver reality based assessments, not promise you sunshine in a swirling hurricane of flying bullets, bombs, excrement & razor wire.

That is all.

[Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 @bayraktar_1love]

Aftermath of the yesterday’s ATACMS and SCALP/Storm Shadow strike on the Russian Shahed storage and launch site at the Donetsk International Airport

[Sophia Proneikos @Pergament_F]

"Books only have two smells. The smell of a new book, which is good, and the smell of an old book, which is even better."
Ray Bradbury

Good night

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

800,000 human brain cells, floating in a dish, have never had a body. Never seen light. Never felt anything. And they just learned to play a video game.

That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened.

These neurons are alive. They fire. They adapt. They get better at DOOM over time, which means something inside that petri dish is changing in response to failure. Scientists call it "goal-directed learning." There is no cleaner definition of that phrase than "it kept trying until it got better." The cells have no survival instinct, no reward system, no reason to improve. They just do.

The part nobody's talking about: researchers have to convert the game's visuals into electrical pulses the neurons can interpret. Which means those cells are perceiving something. Not seeing it the way you do. But processing a version of a world that doesn't exist, inside a container that was never meant to think.

The Turing Test was about machines fooling humans. Nobody wrote the test for this.

[Martin @Martin_Sedi]

It is unbleavable, but it is true

IRGC Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani has been confirmed to be safe in Israel as of this morning 🇮🇱

He has now been revealed to have had a pivotal role in the elimination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah leaders Nasrallah and Safieddine, as well as the elimination of Khamenei and top IRGC generals.

He's Mousad agent number 47!!!

@IDF

#ThankYouBibi

[Masih Alinejad 🏳️ @AlinejadMasih]

I invite you, Prime Minister @sanchezcastejon to watch this 12-minute video. A father moving
among body bags, trying to find his child.
Why didn’t you condemn the massacre of 32,000 by Iran’s regime?
If you are anti war, stand with victims of IRGC war.

[Clément Molin @clement_molin]

OPINION : L'opération israélo-américaine 🇮🇱🇺🇸 en Iran 🇮🇷 n'a pas grand chose de réjouissant

Voilà le 7ème jour de l'opération de changement de régime en Iran. Et le régime… est toujours là. Je ne suis pas sûr que l'opération, ses conséquences régionales et mondiales et ses objectifs devrait vraiment nous réjouir...

Rappelons quelques faits : nous n'allons pas pleurer Khamenei, les gardiens de la révolution et les mollahs iraniens. Ils ont mis en place un état terroriste qui a souvent réalisé des attentats, notamment contre la France, a kidnappé son propre peuple, en particulier les femmes et s'est montré absolument sanguinaire contre toute opposition. Nous n'allons pas pleurer ceux qui ont pris en otage une si belle et si ancienne civilisation et nous ne pleurerons pas le régime s'il est renversé.

Mais je suis un peu mal à l'aise avec l'opération israélo-américaine et ses contours. D'abord, toutes les actions sont faites en dehors de l'ensemble des principes primaires du droit international. Je n'en suis pas un grand défenseur, certes, mais soyons cohérents, notamment au regard de l'Ukraine ou du Groenland et des futurs conflits.

Au delà des principes du droit dont de moins en moins d'états ont quelque chose à faire, il y a aussi les contours de l'opération militaire. Quels sont les objectifs et comment les réaliser ?

Au fond, l'objectif semble le changement de régime. Mais comment changer le régime sans envoyer de troupes au sol ? Après 7 jours de bombardements continus de l'Iran, le régime tient toujours. Pas de défection, pas de rébellion, pas de manifestation. Et puis on l'a vu en janvier, si les manifestants s'aventurent dans les rues, ils feront face à de nouveaux massacres de masse de l'IRCG. Comment le F35 ou le Reaper a faire pour faire du soutien aérien à une foule mitraillée par 3 hommes armés ?
Une conception occidentale est de penser que tous les iraniens sont opposés au régime. Les jeunes y sont plutôt opposés, sans qu'on sache si c'est le cas d'une majorité de la population. Une partie des plus âgés soutien cependant le régime. La majorité des iraniens est probablement attentiste. Est-ce qu'espérer un renversement du régime de l'intérieur est suffisant ? Je ne le crois pas. Si c'était le cas, je serais le premier à m'en réjouir.

Les bombardements israélo-américains visent le programme nucléaire iranien, lui même régi par des accords que Trump a quitté durant son premier mandat. Ils visent aussi les lanceurs de missiles qui terrorisent le Moyen-Orient. De fait, une dizaine d'Etats de la régions sont entrainés dans une guerre dont ils n'ont jamais voulu. La Syrie et l'Irak voient même leur espaces aériens constamment violé.

L'Iran s'en prend désormais aux réserves de pétrole du Golfe, aux espaces aériens et au détroit d'Ormuz. Tout le monde voit venir le choc économique qui est inévitable. Plus la guerre durera et plus il sera important, c'est le pari de l'Iran en ciblant toute la région.

Mais le sujet sur lequel je veux retenir votre attention est celui de la guerre civile. J'ai écouté aujourd'hui un space avec des américains et des israéliens. J'ai été surpris d'entendre qu'une guerre civile ne serait pas une si mauvaise chose pour faire chuter le régime... Rappelons quelques unes des dernières opérations pour changer un régime :
🔹Libye (🇫🇷🇺🇸) -> Guerre civile, séparation du pays, flux d'armes vers le Sahel
🔹Irak (🇺🇸🇬🇧) -> Guerre civile, terrorisme
🔹Afghanistan (🇺🇸) -> Longue guerre, retour des talibans
🔹Soudan (🇦🇪) -> Guerre civile, partition du pays
🔹Ukraine (🇷🇺) -> Invasion à grande échelle, 4 ans de guerre
...
Est-on vraiment sûr que c'est souhaitable ? Si changement de régime il doit y avoir en Iran, il doit venir du peuple iranien. Les projets américains d'envoyer les kurdes, depuis l'Irak pour renverser le régime me paraissent très dangereux, notamment pour le peuple iranien et l'intégrité de l'Etat.

Pensez aussi à la Turquie, au Caucase et à l'Union Européenne qui seraient submergés par une nouvelle crise des migrants, avec cette fois un pays de 90 millions d'habitants, pas 23 (Syrie). Washington et Tel Aviv ne seront pas impactés par les conséquences de cette guerre, eux ne risquent pas grand chose. Pensons également au Liban qui est otage d'une guerre entre Israël et le Hezbollah, alors que l'Etat hébreu s'apprête à raser le sud de Beyrouth... Pensons aussi à Chypre, membre de l'UE attaqué, et à la Turquie, membre de l'OTAN.

Je vois un grand débat en France depuis une semaine. Mon avis n'est pas entier et définitif, il évolue au fil des actions. Peut-être que je me trompe, mais j'ai honnêtement un mauvais pressentiment, pour ne pas dire que je suis pessimiste...

[Masih Alinejad 🏳️ @AlinejadMasih]

I’m not just angry. I’m furious with you Elizabeth Warren.

Stop using the suffering of my people as political ammunition against Donald Trump.

You say you are grieving for those killed in this “unnecessary war.”
Really? I checked your social media. More than 20 posts attacking President Trump after he removed a monster terrorist of Iran, Ali Khamenei, but not one post grieving the massacre of more than 32,000 unarmed Iranian people. Why? Shocking.

More than 10,000 protesters were intentionally blinded by security forces. Young women were shot in the eyes. Students were beaten to death. Families were burying their children. Where were you then?

We are not a tool. The pain of us Iranians is not a talking point for your partisan battles.

As a woman, your silence while women in Iran were being shot, jailed, and blinded is more than disappointing. It is insulting. No it is beyond that. It is a slap in the face of Iranian mothers burying their children who have been killed by Islamic Republic.

I cannot ignore this hypocrisy.
Our suffering did not fit your narrative. Our voices were inconvenient. Now that the situation serves your political agenda, you speak loudly.

Very heartbreaking to see, powerful women in the West totally ignoring Iranians being slaughtered. 💔

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

We received signals from partners in the Middle East. There have been strikes by Iranian “shaheds” on civilians in those countries. They are seeking our expertise. We are open. If their representatives come, we will provide the expertise. Especially since there is also a request from Europeans and from the United States. Requests have come to us to share our experience with partners in the Middle East.

Regarding weapons: we ourselves are at war. And I said, completely frankly, that we have a shortage of what they have. They have missiles for the Patriots, but hundreds or thousands of “shaheds” cannot be intercepted with Patriot missiles – it is too costly. Nothing is too much for the people, of course, but they simply do not have that many missiles. That is why they need interceptor drones, which we have. Meanwhile, we have a shortage of PAC-2 and PAC-3 missiles. So, when it comes to technology or weapons exchange, I believe our country will be open to it.

From an interview with Rai Italia (2/5).

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Adding to my thread on why authoritarians like chaos to include Iran itself. Firing on its neighbors is a way of raising the stakes, of trying to show the cautious Gulf states & Western democracies that it is willing to burn everything down. Part bluff, part desperation.