I’ll soon be sponsoring a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock (and other style) cameras to surveil law abiding citizens.
American Preacher uses common sense to explain how far off track America has become
“If you can get arrested for hunting and fishing without a license, but you can enter this country and remain in this country illegally, you got a country run by idiots
If you have to get your parents' permission to go on a field trip and get an aspirin at school, but you don't have to get their permission to get an abortion, you got a country run by idiots
If you must show identification to board an airplane and cash a check and check out a library book, But you don't have to show identification to vote in our elections. You got a nation run by a bunch of idiots
If the government wants to prevent and they want to take our guns away and turn around and send F-16 fighter jets to our enemy countries, take our guns away and give ammunition to our enemy countries, you have a country run by idiots.
— If your government believes the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars in debt is to spend more trillions of dollars in debt, you got a country run by idiots.”
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.
🇨🇴🇺🇸 The President of Colombia sends a message to Trump:
Instead of arresting the president of Venezuela for oil, you should have arrested Netanyahu, the genocide leader wanted by the International Criminal Court.
🚨 BREAKING: Gov. Ron DeSantis has dropped a bombshell, demanding the complete elimination of property taxes in the United States.
Ron stated, "It's almost like they have to pay rent to the government just to enjoy their property. That's wrong. We need to do something about it."
BREAKING: Coca-Cola has started selling soda with cane sugar in the US after President Trump demanded the company make an American version of its Mexican Coke.