In her YouTube video, titled “Reading Makes You Hot,” which has more than 3.8 million views, Chamberlain describes how reading alleviates her anxiety and depression. She explains, “Reading is harmless. Going on social media is not harmless. It makes you sad, it makes you compare yourself to other people, it makes you depressed.” //

Millions of teens and young adults can relate to Chamberlain’s experience, and research has found a definite causal relationship between social media and depression. A study conducted by the University of Arkansas found that young adults who spent more than 300 minutes a day on social media platforms were “2.8 times as likely to become depressed within six months” than those who spent 120 minutes or less on social media.

According to Nicholas Carr’s bestselling book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” the exhaustion many users experience after engaging with social media stems from the fact that “our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk. The resulting self-consciousness — even, at times, fear — magnifies the intensity of our involvement with the medium. That’s true for everyone, but it’s particularly true for the young.”

Thus, trying to relax through social media is a contradiction of terms. //

Reading, on the other hand, is a rather abnormal activity from an evolutionary standpoint. It requires “an unnatural process of thought, one that demand[s] sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object,” as Carr continues.

Strict mental discipline is needed to “resist the urge to let [one’s] focus skip from one sensory cue to another.” But by detaching from the distractions of the outside world, the reader develops the ability to think and process deeply, to digest and internalize the information being read in a way that no amount of internet research can replace.

Although reading thus poses a relaxing alternative to TikTok or Instagram, the transition process is not without its challenges. When she first began reading for leisure, Chamberlain realized that she “actually had forgotten how to read. I would read a whole page, I’d flip to the next page, and then I’d realize, ‘Oh wait, I absorbed no knowledge or information from that page.’ Then I’d go back and read the page again.”

She is not alone in her struggle. Reading comprehension has been declining in America for years, and lockdowns only exacerbated the situation. But Carr reassures us that rewiring your brain is possible. With enough training, those skills of deep concentration and focus can be relearned, or developed for the first time.

Just make sure to hide your smartphone while you practice.

When interest rates are kept extremely low, people can afford to take on more debt, because the monthly payments cost less. As a result, sellers increase their prices.

This is one of the reasons the real estate market crashed so hard in 2008. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Fed kept interest rates low, encouraging people to take on higher-than-usual levels of debt, especially in the real estate market. //

Rather than learn its lesson from the 2008 crash, the Fed doubled down on this failed strategy, and then tripled down during the Covid-19 response. Congress and the White House were all too willing to cheer the Fed on, since lower interest rates have helped them expand government programs without begging foreign governments to finance U.S. debt.

As a result of these policies, a shockingly large price bubble appears to have formed in the real estate market. The average sales price of a home in the fourth quarter of 2021 was $477,900, compared to $403,900 in the fourth quarter of 2020 and $384,600 in the fourth quarter of 2019. That’s a $93,300 increase in just two years, by far the biggest increase ever recorded in just 24 months. //

However, there is a chance that housing prices will not drop, or only drop minimally. If the Fed decides to continue to keep interest rates low, despite the ongoing inflation crisis, it might prevent a real estate crash the size and scale of the one discussed above. It will come at a cost, though — more inflation, even bigger market distortions, and perhaps the collapse of the dollar.

Regardless of what the Fed does in the short term, it’s clear that America’s disastrous monetary-policy chickens are coming home to roost. Prepare accordingly.

This is how the prosecution framed the case during the trial.

Prosecutor Anu Mantila said it is quite clear that Räsänen has a freedom of religion, but that does not exclude responsibility in using Bible verses.

“If so, the views of the Bible have supplanted the Finnish Constitution”, Mantila said.

The prosecutor made a distinction between the internal and external side of religious freedom: people are allowed to think what they want, but the expression of faith can be restricted. “I emphasise that freedom of thought and conscience is unrestricted. This court does not address the religious views of the Bible and homosexuality. It is addressing the expression of these views.”

The prosecutor reiterated her earlier position that human deeds and identity are indistinguishable. “When one judges deeds, the whole person is judged. Actions cannot be separated from identity because actions are part of identity. Understanding deeds as sin is derogatory”.

According to the prosecutor, the insulting nature of Räsänen’s expressions is obvious. Offensive is emphasised by the focus on sexual identity, the “core of humanity”. //

A decade ago, Archbishop Charles Chaput, then archbishop of Philadelphia, wrote a must-read essay on Christianity’s challenge in America.

Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in—not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now—is somehow friendly to our faith. What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV. And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral—the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called—is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

Durham is going public with more details of his investigation into the Russia Collusion Hoax, but will the courts will stop him? //

The details included in the latest filings, when coupled with revelations in earlier court documents, make it politically impossible at this point for Attorney General Merrick Garland to pull the plug on Durham.

The Special Counsel’s office may instead (or may also) be using the speaking court filings to ensure the investigation is not prematurely shut down by the Biden Administration. The details included in the latest filings, when coupled with revelations in earlier court documents, make it politically impossible at this point for Attorney General Merrick Garland to pull the plug on Durham.

Another possibility is that the Special Counsel’s office wants those inside the government rattled. If so, the tactic worked beautifully.... //

Soon after the public filing of the “discovery update,” the OIG’s apparently complained to Durham’s team about the details included in the court document, trying to justify its failure to turn over Baker’s cell phones. But in doing so, the OIG revealed it had other cell phones that might be of interest.

Or maybe Durham is merely attempting to keep the public informed, in a legal way, with the end goal being restoring some semblance of trust in the DOJ,

Efforts to reduce carbon pollution using ethanol appear to have backfired. //

For over a decade, the US has blended ethanol with gasoline in an attempt to reduce the overall carbon pollution produced by fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks. But a new study says that the practice may not be achieving its goals. In fact, burning ethanol made from corn—the major source in the US—may be worse for the climate than just burning gasoline alone.

Corn drove demand for land and fertilizer far higher than previous assessments had estimated. Together, the additional land and fertilizer drove up ethanol’s carbon footprint to the point where the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions—from seed to tank—were higher than that of gasoline. Some researchers predicted this might happen, but the new paper provides a comprehensive and retrospective look at the real-world results of the policy. //

Today, most gasoline sold in the US contains 10 percent ethanol, and about a third of the corn crop in the country is used to produce the fuel. While other sources would qualify, including ethanol derived from cellulose, “most RFS biofuel production has come from conventional corn ethanol,” the study’s authors pointed out. //

Expanding biofuels production would only add to the inflation, the researchers found. “Our estimates imply that for every billion gallons per year (BGY) expansion of ethanol demand, we would expect a 5.6% increase in corn prices; 1.6 and 0.4% increases in the areas of US corn and cropland, respectively; and attendant increases in GHG emissions, nutrient pollution, and soil erosion,” they wrote.