Friday, July 12, 2013

Training.

7/12 - hyperxt 4x15, shrugs 2x18/3x8, plate shrugs 3x20, neck nod/rot/dt x40, wrist curls/ext/abd/add 3x20/10/8/8, posterior wrist curls/rev curls 3x20/10, hammer curls 3x10, calf press single 3x8, calf press 3x10, knee ups x10/8, crunches x25/20 -- gtg hanging knee ups -- 25 chins & 50 pushups for time
"the **number one reason** anybody isn’t succeeding is because they’re bullshitting themselves into thinking they’re putting in a lot of effort when they’re not. and then they give up because its “not their thing”
What goes through my head whenever someone tells me ‘bro I lift and eat all the time, but I still look the same’."

Today's Internets - "You'll make gains they said."

"...the latest treasure trove of revelations published by The Guardian reveal that Microsoft has given the National Security Agency the means to bypass encryption in its products, including Skype and Outlook. We can probably assume that other American companies have similar arrangements with the NSA"


"Lamar met all the other criteria for dipping his wick elsewhere before today. He’s an NBA baller, so right there you got your 98% chance of infidelity. He’s forced to humiliate himself for his wife’s stupid reality TV show career. And, his lady’s got a little problem laying off the carbs. Faced with that backdrop, rumors of Lamar doinking a D.C. stripper seemed right on point. And, today, they appear to be sealed. With release of this video of Lamar being asked about the stripper by a paparazzi. Rather than say, oh, I don’t know, ‘I love my wife and these rumors are outrageous’, Lamar instead decided to go Mickey Rourke crazy on the paparazzi, grabbing up all his camera shit and tossing it around the streets. This reaction could mean many things. Like, Lamar is having his monthly. Or he believes that photographs are sinister inventions of the devil designed to steal his soul. But it mostly means that Lamar is cheating on Khloe."

Everybody's got a talent.

This is awesome.  UFC fighter decides to start doing charity work - Justin Wren goes from drug addict to Christian Missionary in Congo | Counterpunch - SI.com
"In of a moment of weariness five weeks ago, Justin Wren prayed to God for a sign. Wren, a multi-time state wrestling champion (in all three styles) and a two-time national champion who’d competed on The Ultimate Fighter 10 in 2009, had put a promising fighting career on hold. Now he wanted to return to the Democratic Republic of Congo for a third time this summer with enough funding to help liberate 1,000 Pygmy slaves in one year, but he was struggling to get momentum going for the cause."
...The fighter-turned-Christian missionary woke up on Feb. 28 to find more than 2,000 emails in his inbox after a two-minute cellphone video he’d posted online months earlier had gone viral overnight. In the video, a group of wide-eyed Congolese children crowd around Wren, joyfully petting him like he’s a golden retriever — the first time they’ve ever seen a white man (with arm hair no less) in their remote village. The video took off on Reddit.com, a social-media tracker site on Feb. 26, and aired the next night on The Jimmy Kimmel Show and the following morning on The Today Show. TMZ, Gawker, and Deadspin all picked up the warm and fuzzy clip, which got 400,000 views in the first 24 hours and is closing in on one million hits."
The "warm & fuzzy" clip = Awesome.
"As the story behind the video has spread, Wren has been inundated with requests to share it. The last month has been a whirlwind of regional, national and international TV, radio and podcast interviews; meetings with philanthropists, supply companies, publicists, film and TV producers, and literary agents (Wren has already signed on with New York’s Foundry Media and Literary Agency to pen a book with this writer about his experiences). Wren has traveled to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, sleeping in hotel rooms donated by MMA fans and on friends’ couches, so that every possible avenue could be taken to get the word out about the Pygmy plight...

The story — a universal one about helping those less fortunate — is striking a chord. So far, Wren’s raised nearly half of the $50,000 he’ll need to return to the DRC this summer to aid nine enslaved Mbutu Pygmy tribes facing starvation, inhumane persecution, and in some cases, extermination. The project is called “Fight for the Forgotten,” which through a partnership with the Congo-based Shalom University, aims to free 1,000 enslaved Pygmies in one year and relocate them to land where they’ll eventually be able to self-sustain themselves...

Wren was once among those who found it hard to imagine that slavery still exists in this day and age. It was something he didn’t quite grasp until Wren saw it with his own eyes during his previous month-long trips to the DRC in July 2011 and August 2012. The Pygmies, whose average man reaches no taller than 4-foot-9, are a people shun by the other tribes in Eastern Congo. Pygmies are often referred to as animals, said Wren, and are denied medical care, education and citizenship in their own country. Their tribes are pushed into the jungles with little to protect themselves from the elements and they become slaves when landowners claim the soil from underneath them. Deforestation has caused the wildlife to scatter, which has forced the hunter-driven Pygmies to rely upon their slave owners for survival, said Wren. It’s a firmly established caste system built on a foundation of superstition and prejudice."

"Fight For The Forgotten is a non-profit making life-altering impact in the remote parts of the Congo jungle. We are working to free the Mbuti Pygmy people from slavery and then develop sustainability. The heart of FFTF is to radically love the unloved!"

You can donate here - Donation Form


Hey look, more inaccurate health fear mongering! - CDC Admits There Is No Benefit In Reducing Salt | WREG.com
"For years, we’ve been told to reduce the amount of salt in our diets but the benefits may have been exaggerated. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now says the the amount of salt taken in is no longer a substantial health hazard. The study found, “…the committee found no consistent evidence to support an association between sodium intake and either a beneficial or adverse effect on on most health outcomes.” The report warns that reducing our salt intake below 1 tsp per day could actually be a negative."





Thursday, July 11, 2013

Training.

7/11 - hyperxt 5x15, smith machine squats 5x5, leg press 3x8, leg x 3x10, leg curls 3x10 -- gtg chins

Teamwork.

Today's Internets - "He will be a child of light."

"The windowless, two-story structure, which is larger than a football field, was completed this year at a cost of $34 million. But the military has no plans to ever use it. Commanders in the area, who insisted three years ago that they did not need the building, now are in the process of withdrawing forces and see no reason to move into the new facility...

For many senior officers, the unused headquarters has come to symbolize the staggering cost of Pentagon mismanagement: As American troops pack up to return home, U.S.-funded contractors are placing the finishing touches on projects that are no longer required or pulling the plug after investing millions of dollars."

Great Picture?  Or Greatest Picture Ever?
 "North Carolina House Republicans have, without notice, inserted sweeping changes to the state's abortion rules into a motorcycle safety law. Effectively, they've reintroduced the abortion bill that Governor Pat McCrory had threatened to veto."

"This is the second time little-known company AlterG has blown our minds. Last year it was with a rather impressive anti-gravity treadmill. The Bionic Leg, however, is even more incredible. From the company's description it's "the first wearable, mobile robotic exoskeleton for lower extremity physical therapy." Using it, patients can use their leg as they did before they were injured. The Bionic Leg provides motorized assistance with extension (straightening your knee), which kicks in when you're standing up from a seated position, swinging your leg forward between steps, and going up stairs. It also provides resistance for flexion (bending your knee), so it kicks in when you're lowering yourself down to sitting, squatting, or when you're going down stairs. It enables patients to move without having to compensate in ways that would slow down their rehab or possibly cause other complications."

"Florida tried to ban Internet Cafes that were functioning as unlicensed casinos, but may have banned smartphones and computers instead, due to language that defines slot machines as "any machine or device or system or network of devices" that can be used in connection with games of chance. I question the legitimacy of shutting down all Internet Cafes in the first place, but this is clearly an overbroad definition, as has been pointed out in a suit challenging the law, brought by an Internet Cafe owner in Miami "

"77-year-old golf legend...  Obviously I’m not an Olympic athlete in comparison but what I have done is I’ve exercised profusely for 63 years now.” 
In fact, health and fitness (and what he considers a sheer lack of it among many Americans) is a subject that stirs furious passion in Player, who says he does 1,200 crunches each morning and still manages to squat 250 pounds. “America is maybe the most unhealthy nation in the world because they live on crap,” Player said. “They’ve got the best food in the world, the best farmers and the best food but they live on crap. When [British chef] Jamie Oliver went to America he went to areas where children never had cabbage or broccoli or spinach or vegetables in their life. People giving their children a soft drink and a doughnut to go to school. No wonder academically they’re affected.”"

"Today, I got a message from my brother on Facebook that read, "They're watching you." This wouldn't have been such a big deal if he hadn't been dead for two years. FML"

"When the history of the American space program is finally written, no figure will stand out quite like John Whiteside Parsons.  He was an unorthodox genius, a poet and rocket scientist who helped give birth to an institution that would become mankind’s window on the universe. He was also a devotee of the black arts, a sci-fi junkie and host of backyard orgies on Pasadena’s stately Millionaires’ Row.  
He was an acolyte of Aleister Crowley, an employee of Howard Hughes, a victim of L. Ron Hubbard, and an enthusiastic phone buddy to Wernher Von Braun. He was an only child, his adulterous dad booted by his angry mom. In seeking father figures and brotherhood, he became a vital link in two mighty chains in human history: rocketry and ritual magic. His science was built on intuition, and his magic on experiment. (“The Magical Father of American Rocketry,” Reason, May 2005) [He was] remarkably handsome, dashing and brilliant…Werner von Braun claimed it was the self-taught Parsons, not himself, who was the true father of the American space program for his contribution to the development of solid rocket fuel...

As for Babalon? Well, the jury is still out on the Apocalypse, but it’s worth noting that within two years of the Babalon workings, which began in 1946, the first Atomic Bomb was detonated, the Roswell crash sparked a rash of UFO sightings that continues to this day, and LSD was invented. In other words, things got a lot weirder, and they’re getting weirder every day."


"For several days now, CNN’s extensive coverage of the George Zimmerman trial has shouldered aside the more important Egypt story on the network’s U.S. channel. I rarely criticize CNN in public, partly out of loyalty, but also to avoid hypocrisy. No one spends 20 years in cable news and comes away entirely clean. In this case, however, I’m tempted to agree with Jay Rosen, who believes it’s time to give up on CNN. I want to add a bullet point to his list of complaints." 

42-Year-Old Pot Conviction Stops 20-Year Army Veteran From Buying a Rifle - Hit & Run : Reason.com:
"Ron Kelly, a 20-year Army veteran, recently tried to buy a .22-caliber rifle at the Wal-Mart in Tomball, Texas. He was turned away because he failed the FBI background check. He appealed the rejection, and last month he got a Justice Department letter explaining that he was legally disqualified from owning guns, after handling them in defense of his country for two decades, because of a 42-year-old marijuana conviction. As a high school student in Durham, North Carolina, he had been caught with a small amount of pot and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor possession, receiving a sentence of probation because he was a first-time offender. The probation lasted a year, but according to the Justice Department the ensuing loss of Kelly's Second Amendment rights lasts a lifetime."

I don't even know what's happening here.
"Fem! Batman Villains ♣Lolita inspired♣ All costumes designed by each of us.  From left to right. Scarecrow- ADAMANTIUM-SOUL Joker- PERILOUSSEAS Riddler- LILACINCREMENT Two Face- GALAXYSHIBA Photog- AHBUTOGRAPHY"

"Today, while having a serious talk with my father, he said, "Son, you're only alive because of a faulty, off-brand condom." FML"

"1. HE WAS BORN DURING A LIGHTNING STORM Nikola Tesla was born around midnight, between July 9 and July 10, 1856 during a fierce lightning storm. According to family legend, in the middle of the birth, the midwife wrung her hands and declared the lightning a bad omen. This child will be a child of darkness, she said, to which his mother replied: "No. He will be a child of light..."
4. HE DEVELOPED THE IDEA FOR SMARTPHONE TECHNOLOGY IN 1901 Tesla may have had a brilliant mind, but he was not as good at reducing his ideas to practice, Carlson said. In the race to develop transatlantic radio, Tesla described to his funder and business partner, J.P. Morgan, a new means of instant communication that involved gathering stock quotes and telegram messages, funneling them to his laboratory, where he would encode them and assign them each a new frequency. That frequency would be broadcast to a device that would fit in your hand, he explained. In other words, Tesla had envisioned the smart phone and wireless internet, Carlson said, adding that of all of his ideas, that was the one that stopped him in his tracks."


Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Training.

7/10 - bench 3x3/4x1/10, ovh press 15/2x10/4x3/26, dips 2x10/2x8, up row 10/3x8, db lat 5x10, ovh trix 2x15, cgpushup 2x15, gtg pullups

7/9 - hyperxt 4x15, deadlift 3x3/2/5x1/10, pulldowns 5x10, rows 4x10, alt db curls 3x10, pullups x10, ng chins x10, chins x10 -- gtg ng chins


Today's Internets - "Nature Loves Courage."

"The Myth: Whenever the ancient Romans needed more trident-stabbing fodder for the pleasure dome's gladiators or more kibble for the Colosseum's big cats, Roman authorities simply rounded up another group of Christians and herded them into the arena...

The Reality: There are zero authentic accounts of Christian martyrdom in the Colosseum until over a century after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. In fact, not a single legitimate record exists of the Romans executing any Christians in the Colosseum. 

...back when Emperor Nero was busily persecuting early Christians as arsonists, the Colosseum hadn't even been built yet. And by the time construction was completed decades later, Imperial Rome had reverted back to its standard policy of "Jesus, Yahweh, Zeus -- whatever, just pay your taxes, K?"

But there's an entire tradition of martyrs, saints, and apostles who were eaten by lions, burned at the stake, or murdered to appease the crowds of the Colosseum! So where did all those pleasant bedtime stories come from? Brace yourself for a touch of deja vu, because the short answer is: early Christian writers.

In the second century A.D., a whole new genre of fiction cropped up. The "Martyr Acts" were stories about the church's beginnings, when heroic men and women professed their faith in spite of terrible torture and suffering. This "sacred pornography of cruelty" was hugely popular -- if you were a literate Christian living in Imperial Rome, the Martyr Acts were your Harry Potter. With symbolism even less subtle than Dan Brown's novels, the Martyr Acts told stories of good and pure Christians being trampled to death or decapitated by violent Roman officials. The Martyr Acts satisfied the desire of early Christians to: 1) read faith-affirming literature filled with heroes exemplifying pacifism, love, and forgiveness and 2) read faith-affirming literature overflowing with the violence, death, and destruction that made a story readable to Romans."

"Moss, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame, challenges some of the most hallowed legends of the religion when she questions what she calls “the Sunday school narrative of a church of martyrs, of Christians huddled in catacombs out of fear, meeting in secret to avoid arrest and mercilessly thrown to lions merely for their religious beliefs.” None of that, she maintains, is true. In the 300 years between the death of Jesus and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, there were maybe 10 or 12 scattered years during which Christians were singled out for supression by Rome’s imperial authorities, and even then the enforcement of such initiatives was haphazard — lackadaisical in many regions, although harsh in others. “Christians were never,” Moss writes, “the victims of sustained, targeted persecution.”

Much of the middle section of “The Myth of Persecution” is taken up with a close reading of the six “so-called authentic accounts” of the church’s first martyrs. They include Polycarp, a bishop in Smyrna during the second century who was burned at the stake, and Saint Perpetua, a well-born young mother executed in the arena at Carthage with her slave, Felicity, at the beginning of the third century. Moss carefully points out the inconsistencies between these tales and what we know about Roman society, the digs at heresies that didn’t even exist when the martyrs were killed and the references to martyrdom traditions that had yet to be established. There’s surely some kernel of truth to these stories, she explains, as well as to the first substantive history of the church written in 311 by a Palestinian named Eusebius. It’s just that it’s impossible to sort the truth from the colorful inventions, the ax-grinding and the attempts to reinforce the orthodoxies of a later age.

Moss also examines surviving Roman records. She notes that during the only concerted anti-Christian Roman campaign, under the emperor Diocletian between 303 and 306, Christians were expelled from public offices. Their churches, such as the one in Nicomedia, across the street from the imperial palace, were destroyed. Yet, as Moss points out, if the Christians were holding high offices in the first place and had built their church “in the emperor’s own front yard,” they could hardly have been in hiding away in catacombs before Diocletian issued his edicts against them...

This is not to deny that some Christians were executed in horrible ways under conditions we’d consider grotesquely unjust. But it’s important, Moss explains, to distinguish between “persecution” and “prosecution.” The Romans had no desire to support a prison population, so capital punishment was common for many seemingly minor offenses; you could be sentenced to be beaten to death for writing a slanderous song. Moss distinguishes between those cases in which Christians were prosecuted simply for being Christians and those in which they were condemned for engaging in what the Romans considered subversive or treasonous activity...

Today, polemicists continue to use the deeply ingrained belief in a persecuted — and therefore morally righteous — church as a political club to demonize their opponents. Moss sees a direct link between the valorization of martyrs and preposterous right-wing rhetoric about the “war on Christianity.” It’s a tactic that makes compromise impossible."

"I listen to people a lot. And I use my own brain." -- Out. Standing.




"America's 11-judge Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has made more than a dozen classified rulings that vastly expanded the powers of America's spy agencies, operating under an obscure legal doctrine called "special needs." Under this doctrine, established in 1989 in a Supreme Court case over drug testing railway workers, a "minimal intrusion on privacy" is allowed in order to help the state mitigate "overriding public danger." FISC's rulings have widened this ruling to allow for wholesale spying in the name of preventing "nuclear proliferation," as well as terrorism. The NYT calls this a "shadow Supreme Court" but notes that FISC proceedings only hear from the government -- no one presents alternatives to the government's arguments."



“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book”: The new warrior cop is out of control - Salon.com: "Excerpted from "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" 

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team...


On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”

 In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Given the proximity to Culosi’s death, residents could be forgiven for thinking the police department believed wagering on sports was a crime punishable by execution.

In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery...

By the end of the 2000s, police departments were sending SWAT teams to enforce regulatory law. In August 2010, for example, a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black-and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. More raids followed in September and October. The Orlando Sentinel reported that police held barbers and customers at gunpoint and put some in handcuffs, while they turned the shops inside out. The police raided a total of nine shops and arrested thirty-seven people.

By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for “barbering without a license,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida. The most disturbing aspect of the Orlando raids was that police didn’t even attempt to obtain a legal search warrant. They didn’t need to, because they conducted the raids in conjunction with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Despite the guns and handcuffs, under Florida law these were licensure inspections, not criminal searches, so no warrants were necessary. That such “administrative searches” have become an increasingly common way for police to get around the Fourth Amendment is bad enough. More disturbing is the amount of force they’re opting to use when they do. 

...the Fourth Amendment requires that searches be “reasonable.” If using a SWAT team to make sure a bar isn’t serving nineteen-year-olds is a reasonable use of force, it’s hard to imagine what wouldn’t be. At least a couple of federal appeals courts have recognized the absurdity. In 2009 the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck a small blow for common sense, allowing a civil rights suit to go forward against the sheriff’s department of Rapides Parish, Louisiana, after a warrantless SWAT raid on a nightclub thinly veiled as an administrative search. And in 1995 the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit made an even broader ruling, finding that having probable cause and a warrant for the arrest of one person in a club did not justify a SWAT raid and subsequent search of the entire club and everyone inside.

...On the Friday afternoon before the 2009 G-20 summit was to begin in Pittsburgh at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, a reader in the city sent me a photo he’d snapped moments earlier. The photo was of a police officer standing in the middle of an intersection. He was wearing a military-green top, camouflage pants, and combat boots. He had a gun strapped to his thigh and looked to be carrying another one. The camouflage in particular seemed odd—as it does whenever it’s worn by a police officer in an urban area. It was unclear why this cop would have wanted to hide, and even if he did, how camouflage would help him do so in the city. There seemed to be little purpose for it other than to mimic the military. In any case, it was a sign of what was to come.

...This is how the country that gave the world the First Amendment now handles protest. There’s a disquieting ease now with which authorities are willing to crush dissent—and at the very sorts of events where the right to dissent is the entire purpose of protecting free speech—that is, events where influential policymakers meet to make high-level decisions with far-reaching consequences. In fact, the more important the policymakers and the more consequential the decisions they’ll be making, the more likely it is that police will use more force to keep protesters as far away as possible..."



""Louis Freeh, the tech-hostile FBI chief who removed computers from his desk, is now a cybersecurity expert," tweets defense technology journalist Noah Shachtman. "Shoot me.""

The good old days. 

"Sometimes, they have a point."


"A federal judge today rejected the assertion from President Barack Obama’s administration that the state secrets defense barred a lawsuit alleging the government is illegally siphoning Americans’ communications to the National Security Agency. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, however, did not give the Electronic Frontier Foundation the green light to sue the government in a long-running case that dates to 2008, with trips to the appellate courts in between. The EFF’s lawsuit accuses the federal government of working with the nation’s largest telecommunication companies to illegally funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency — a surveillance program the EFF said commenced under the President George W. Bush administration following 9/11. The allegations were based on a former AT&T technician’s documents that outline a secret room in an AT&T San Francisco office that routes internet traffic to the NSA."







"Today, while at the doctor's, a week overdue with my first child, I was told that sex and orgasms can sometimes help to induce labor. On the way home, my boyfriend asked for road head, arguing that "She said that stuff about orgasms." Not you, honey. FML"

"Use of No Fly List to Pressure Americans Abroad to Become Informants
The number of U.S. persons on the No Fly List has more than doubled since 2009, and people mistakenly on the list are denied their due process rights to meaningfully challenge their inclusion. In many cases Americans only find out they are on the list while they are traveling abroad, which all but forces them to interact with the U.S. government from a position of extreme vulnerability, and often without easy access to counsel. Many of those prevented from flying home have been subjected to FBI interviews while they sought assistance from U.S. Embassies to return. In those interviews, FBI agents sometimes offer to take people off the No Fly List if they agree to become an FBI informant.

In 2010 the ACLU and its affiliates filed a lawsuit on behalf of 10 American citizens and permanent residents, including several U.S. military veterans, seven of whom were prevented from returning home until the suit was filed. We argue that barring them from flying without due process was unconstitutional. There are now 13 plaintiffs; none have been charged with a crime, told why they are barred from flying, or given an opportunity to challenge their inclusion on the No Fly List."

"Dani Reese: Why would the universe make fun of us all? 
Charlie Crews: Maybe it’s insecure."


"Crews: We have to use his own strength against him. 
Reese: His strength, what’s his strength? 
Crews: His weakness. 
Reese: His weakness is his strength? 
Crews: Exactly, it’s like the one-handed clap. 
Reese: Are you really zen? 
Crews: I’m zennish."


"Ted: You sure she’s going to show? 
Charlie: She said she’d be here. But you know women. 
Ted: No. Not really. 
Charlie: Neither do I."

"What do you want, Charlie? Crews: I want to be the unwobbling pivot at the center of an ever-revolving universe. I want to be still." 


"The Department of Veterans Affairs got out of the deciding game," Pitzl-Waters says. The new rules stated that as long as a soldier filled out the proper paperwork and the symbol they wanted was linked with an existing religious community, a soldier could have any emblem they wanted on their tombstone. "You can’t just put, say, a Metallica logo on your headstone, but otherwise, the VA shifted the onus off of themselves in deciding what is or isn’t an 'appropriate’ religion...
On May 10, 2013, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs quietly made an update to its official list of approved emblems, adding Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir. "There was no press release, no announcement, nothing," Pitzl-Waters marvels. "They just dumped the symbol, and all of a sudden, there was Thor’s hammer." Implicit in the VA’s spontaneous recognition of Mjölnir was that someone had died, but who?

Details are thin: His name was Shane, and he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps. He came from an extremely private family of Odinists, and he died in August 2012. After his death, his mother campaigned for the VA to not only allow Shane to have the symbol of Mjölnir placed on his headstone but for the same right to be extended retroactively to her husband, Mark, who had been buried by the Department of Veterans Affairs under a blank headstone under stricter rules. After ten months of red tape, the VA finally relented, and where once the space had been left empty, Mjölnir was carved into both of their headstones."

The next chapter in The Lonely Island's "Just 2 Guyz" saga - watch for the old school Digital Underground shout out.

"....from Serrano’s perspective, many of the summonses seemed to make no sense. “This happened to me—they rolled up to this poor Mexican guy sitting on the stairs and said: ‘Write him.’ I’m looking at Sarge, like, ‘What am I writing him for?’ ” The sergeant said, “Blocking pedestrian traffic.” Later, back at the precinct, Serrano read what exactly constitutes “blocking pedestrian traffic.” “This guy was sitting on the stairs, and there is room for someone to walk by,” he says. “If a person is trying to enter the building and cannot because you’re blocking them, that’s blocking pedestrian traffic. But he was not blocking pedestrian traffic.”

Serrano and his fellow officers understood why their bosses pressured them to write so many summonses and 250s. As one cop put it, “The more 250s, the better it makes the commanding officer look.” They knew the stress their bosses were under when they went to CompStat meetings...." Once a commander returned to the station house, of course, he passed down that pressure to everyone else: to the lieutenants, the sergeants, down to the officers. For every crime hot spot, the precinct commander had to show that he was on top of the situation, that his cops were taking action. He had no way of counting exactly how many crimes he’d prevented—how do you count robberies and shootings before they happen?—but he could offer up the next best thing: high numbers of 250s and summonses."


Completely and utterly awesome - TERENCE McKENNA: Nature loves courage
"I can say from personal experience that there is truth in this quote. I never believed in “The Secret”, all that talk of “if you put positive energy into the universe, the universe will reward you” or “the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward”. I thought it was new age bullshit – something Dr. Phil and other ‘life coaches’ trotted out to suckers. But honestly, my experience over the past 18 months has changed my mind. I had an impossible dream (become a web cartoonist) and I made the commitment and hurled myself into the abyss (quit my job and sold my house to fund the dream) and so far, it’s worked out better than I could have imagined. As soon as I handed in my resignation letter, good things started happening to me. Tim Ferriss contacted me about contributing to his book, my house was sold after I was super stressed that it wouldn’t, and all sorts of other small, positive things encouraged me to keep going. It did kind of feel that the universe was rewarding me for making the decision to finally act on my impossible dream.

Now I don’t want to give people a false sense of hope – that all you have to do is take the leap and everything will work out peachy. For me, ‘making the commitment’ means working my ass off, drawing these comics 6-7 days a week. But the work is satisfying and meaningful to me. So I would say that hard work, planning, skill, commitment and grit make up 90% of the equation, but maybe that last 10% is just deciding to hurl yourself into the abyss."
















Monday, July 08, 2013

Training.

7/8 - hyperx 2x20/15, bb shrugs x20/3x15, plate shrugs 3x18, neck nod/rotation/dt x30, calf raise 3x15, 1l calf press 4x8, calf press 3x18, wrist curl/ext/hammer 3x20/15/15, decline tw situp x25, knee ins x25 -- gtg COCT

Andy Dwyer got jacked - Chris Pratt Got Hella In Shape for ‘Guardians of the - BroBible.com:
 "Chris Pratt is probably best known for playing the affable yet slightly dough-ey Andy Dwyer on Parks and Rec. Andy, like any good Parks and Rec man, doesn't seem to be too concerned about eating manly bacon foods. Pratt though, has been on the grind for the upcoming film Guardians of the Galaxy, in which Pratt plays an alien/intergalactic warrior who apparently fights mad people. Meaning, looking slightly 300-esque is somewhat required."