GeorgeinsFL

It’s not okay for anyone to be sleeping on the sidewalk in the world’s richest country. We can fix this. My promise: When I’m mayor, we’ll cut tents and encampments in half by the Olympics and bring everyone in tents and encampments indoors by the end of my first term.

POLL: Nearly three-quarters of Americans — including 91% of Republicans and 70% of Independents — say the U.S. is winning against Iran. 40% of Democrats side with Iran.

Dear airlines far and wide, as long as you charge for checked bags while carryons fly free, people will continue to bring everything they own and the kitchen sink on board. We then are all treated to twenty minutes of watching the gate lice swarm the boarding area while a poor harassed underpaid employee begs the crowd to gate check for free. It is an epic failure of basic incentive structures and we are all embarrassed for having been here for this.

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.

New “No Tax” just dropped:

If we have so much oil and gas in the United States, why are the prices so high at the gas station? Explain it to me like I’m 5.