SSUM ehT

Preach, Coach!

a good example of this is John Lydon -- uberpunk Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols fame -- who met his wife when he was 19 or so, married her at 23 and stayed married for 44 years until her death after a long battle with alzheimers during which he was her full-time caregiver.

@LDS_Dems @He_manQuil Melissa Hortman? The only Democrat to vote against healthcare for illegal aliens in Minnesota, and was then murdered by a Tim Walz appointee?

@He_manQuil Melissa Hortman would like a word

I do not think the assassination attempt in Butler, PA was fake. But...I am genuinely bewildered by the Trump admin response to it. Where is the investigation into the shooter? Why wasn't there a serious study of Secret Service failures? Why don't they want answers?

This is how America under Obama looked like after signing the deal with Iran 👇🏻

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.

Graham Platner is a man so mentally damaged he’s receiving $5,000 a month — tax free! — from the government in disability pay, yet he wants to be a Senator. Either is incapable of being a Senator, or he has been arranging his finances to claim benefits which he does not deserve.

Check out the stunning dominance of former clerks to Justice Scalia as they argued over 50% of the cases on the SCOTUS docket this term, far more than former clerks to other justices. In addition to the recently reported dominance of Justice Scalia's name in briefs and oral arguments, it is a sign of his lasting influence at the highest levels of the legal profession. In answering the most pressing questions in the law, we still look to his opinions—whether for the majority or in concurrence or dissent—and his many illuminating writings and speeches. news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/sc…

“I’m a single mom with three kids…” Yes, Katie. Because you physically abused your ex-husband.

There's a clay tablet with the founding charter of a 12-partner company on it. Twelve merchants pooled 33 pounds of gold to start the firm. The contract has the partner names, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for cashing out early. The tablet is nearly 4,000 years old. It was found at a site called Kanesh, in central Turkey. Archaeologists have dug up 23,500 of these clay records there, most of them business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, lawsuits. The houses they were stored in eventually burned. The fire baked the clay solid and preserved every record. The merchants came from Assur, in modern-day Iraq. They loaded donkeys with tin and cloth and walked them 1,000 kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta. Each donkey carried about 180 pounds and the trip took two to three months. They came home with silver and gold. The company ran for twelve years under a merchant named Amur Ishtar. A third of the profits went back to the investors. Pull your share out early and the firm gave you four kilos of silver per kilo of gold, half the normal rate. Locked-up money was meant to stay locked up. That one company was just a tiny piece. The tablets show a complete economy with partners suing each other in commercial court, husbands writing home about prices, and wives writing back complaining the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum quietly lent silver to four different men over nine years. People bought up other people's loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans, the same thing Wall Street does today with mortgage-backed securities. One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax. In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, Chicago, and Virginia ran the tablet numbers through a gravity model, the math economists use today to predict how much two countries will trade based on size and distance. The Bronze Age numbers matched modern trade numbers almost exactly. Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate it does between countries today. The paper ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. There was no economic theory yet. The idea didn't even have a name. The word "capitalism" wouldn't be coined for another 3,800 years, and Adam Smith was 3,700 years away from writing a sentence about markets. Just a guy named Pushu-ken writing a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth, and a woman in Assur recording who owed her how much silver. Capitalism was already there, doing its full job, almost four thousand years before anyone wrote down a theory of how it worked.

@LDS_Dems You’re just going to pretend that Community Note doesn’t exist, aren’t you?

The Golden Age!

The first Alito footnote is notable: he says the original case was conferenced 7 months ago. That says there’s more than a little smoke to the rumors the liberal justices drug their feel to impact the midterms, and now Jackson is throwing a fit the majority is fixing that delay

Right so instead of saying this on Newsmax maybe what we do is absolutely flood the zone with 30 second ads to destroy his image before he can build a new one

Justice Alito fires back at Justice Jackson, calling her solo dissent "baseless and insulting" and "utterly irresponsible" after she accused the majority of abandoning principle for power.

The reality: LWR - being falsely told that all group performance gaps, and all your failures, are due to evil hidden enemies. RWR - being actually made to give half your stuff to people who hate you.

Still the greatest interview ever caught on camera

@ishapiro He hung Kamala around Democrats’ necks, too.

I wonder if Joe Biden, in his lucid moments, regrets picking his Supreme Court justice based on race and sex rather than merit.

@CBSNews Jackson (Kagan and Sotomayor) had SEVEN months to author dissent, which was deliberately slow walked in an attempt to put a thumb on the midterms scale.

Supreme Court lets Louisiana redistricting ruling take effect immediately, sparking angry words between Alito and Jackson cbsn.ws/4d68MqY

@GovPritzker You’re just angry that Democrats can’t racially discriminate anymore when gerrymandering, and will lose seats because of their previous racist apportionment.

The Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act is an attack on our constitutional republic. Illinois will fight back, uphold our values, and safeguard democracy.

@vritzien You’re just angry that Democrats can’t racially discriminate anymore when gerrymandering, and will lose seats because of their previous racist apportionment.

So they gut the VRA because they needed a stronger burden of proof for Louisiana’s racial gerrymandering… to then declare that same map a racist gerrymander like 2 days later?

Well, well, well, how the turntables...

@TheAtlantic @GrahamDavidA You’re just angry that Democrats can’t racially discriminate anymore when gerrymandering, and will lose seats because of their previous racist apportionment.

Chief Justice John Roberts once decried partisan gerrymandering as “unjust.” Last week, the high court made a decision that doesn’t just tolerate but encourages the practice, @GrahamDavidA argues: theatlantic.com/newsletters/20…