Fortune inside Chinese restaurant cookie: “You find beauty in ordinary things. Appreciate this gift.”
When people get up and move, even a little, they tend to be happier than when they are still, according to an interesting new study that used cellphone data to track activities and moods. In general, the researchers found, people who move are more content than people who sit.
There already is considerable evidence that physical activity is linked to psychological health. Epidemiological studies have found, for example, that people who exercise or otherwise are active typically are less prone to depression and anxiety than sedentary people.
But many of these studies focused only on negative moods....
For the new study...researchers...decided to try a different approach. They would look, they decided, at correlations between movement and happiness, that most positive of emotions....
...people...turned out to feel happier when they had been moving in the past quarter-hour than when they had been sitting or lying down, even though most of the time they were not engaged in rigorous activity....
...The links between moving in any way and feeling happy were consistent for most people throughout the day....It also didn’t matter whether it was a workday or weekend. [read more]
[Trump] said in a speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in June: “We will respect and defend Christian Americans. Christian Americans.”
His personnel choices suggest he meant it. Consider Vice President Pence, a man who regularly tries to make policy obey the dictates of faith. In 2002, he gave a speech on the House floor criticizing public schools for teaching evolution but not creationism, even though creationism “was believed in by every signer of the Declaration of Independence.”
Running for Congress in 2000, Mr. Pence called for federal AIDS funding to be directed to groups that “provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior,” which many have understood to mean gay-conversion therapy, though a spokesman has said this mischaracterized his intent. When in 2002, then Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed the use of condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, Mr. Pence argued (falsely) that they offer “very, very poor protection” and decried Mr. Powell’s support for them as “too modern of an answer.” He is, needless to say, a tireless foe of Planned Parenthood: In 2011, when the House voted to defund the family planning provider, the legislation was known as the Pence Amendment. [read more]
Even if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs....
It seems that the Trump administration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done....
Other Republicans have gone far out of their way to make sure the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam or on Arabs, but Trump has gone out of his way to ensure the opposite....
It is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty. The Trump administration is often harsh and never kind....
None of these traits will improve with time. As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him....It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment.” [read more]
LONDON — For Ghassan and Sarmad Assali, naturalized Americans from Syria, 14 years of efforts to bring their family to the United States from Damascus unraveled this weekend at the stroke of Donald Trump’s pen....
The family was sent back to Damascus, arriving Sunday night.
Of course, Trump cares nothing for the plight of the Assalis’ Damascus relatives, who arrived about 15 hours after the president signed an executive order on Friday suspending all immigration from Syria and six other mainly Muslim countries, and barring entry of Syrian refugees indefinitely. In fact, he cares nothing for Syria. Trump’s airy mention of creating safe zones in the war-ravaged country was an example of how the American president’s word — the basis of global stability since 1945 — has already ceased to mean anything. It’s noise. [read more]
| Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle |
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