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Saturday, February 23, 2013

Today's Internets.

The Philip Experiment: "In September 1972, the Toronto Society for Psychical Research, along with poltergeist expert Dr. A.R.G. Owen, set out to accomplish one singular objective: To create a ghost. Not conjure, or contact. They wanted to explore the Tibetan Buddhist concept of tulpas, or “thoughtforms,” the practice of “willing” tangible forms into existence using our own innate mental energies."


Is "Obama" coming to take your guns?  Probably not, but with stuff like this you can see how people might think so...  
DHS Contractor Apologizes For Selling Shooting Targets of Children // Current TV: "A company which received $2 million dollars from the DHS has apologized and taken offline “no more hesitation” shooting targets which depicted pregnant women, children, and elderly gun owners in residential settings as “non-traditional threats,” following an online uproar. “Offensive” cut-outs depicting pregnant women, gun owners in residential settings removed from website. As we first reported on Tuesday, Law Enforcement Targets Inc. (LET), a Minneapolis based company that has received almost $2 million dollars in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security over the last three years, recently began selling cardboard cut-out targets designed to desensitize police to “non-traditional threats,” including pregnant women, mothers in school playgrounds, and little boys, as well as elderly gun owners in their homes."

IN. 
Look! Robert DeNiro And Sylvester Stallone In The Ring As Rival Boxers In Grudge Match - Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movies and TV News and Rumors: "Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro in costume and battered-up make-up comes from the set of Grudge Match. The film is a comedy about two over the hill boxers in a one-last-time storyline."


evellios: lilytrann: chroniclesofness: ... - Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight.: "evellios: lilytrann: chroniclesofness: shawna-marie: Supposedly there is a new study that says when a woman sits on a guy’s hips when he is doing a chest press, his testosterone rises up to about 97.9% which promotes strength and muscle growth. 
I would not mind helping, at all.  
Oh we doing this for sure.  
his testosterone rises up to about 97.9% 
oh so that’s what we’re calling it now"

Texts From Last Night: "(630): no, but he did start crying. who the fuck is 30, covered in tattoos and crys about an ex? get your shit together, man."


FML: after supporting my girlfriend,…: "Today, after supporting my girlfriend for over a year in her endeavour to lose weight, excercise more, and eat better, my now-slender girlfriend dumped me. Because now she "can do so much better". FML"


Fascinating hypothesis.  On the face of it, makes sense.
Your Parents Were Middle Class Because Of The Soviet Union: "...So how was my father and other families like ours able to do it?  How can a  first year college professor purchase a home with two kids, and a stay at home wife? 

BECAUSE OF THE SOVIET UNION. 

Let’s be honest, my father didn’t have any competition. From the end of WWII to the end of the Cold War, The United States did not have any strong foreign competition, and we can thank the Soviet Union for that. The Soviet Union, and the Iron Curtain that it cast over Europe, was the best thing that ever could happen to the United States. With little foreign competition, many U.S companies were able to form strong labor unions, the government could apply trade protections, and we also had an embargo with the entire Soviet Bloc including China, Russia, Ukraine, and half of Germany. My father’s main competition was mostly with other European-Americans living in the United States..."



Training.

2/23 - P90X2 D13 X2 Balance & Power -- pullups 12/10/8/6/4 -- burpees 8/3x10 

My excuses are invalid.


Friday, February 22, 2013

Today's Internets.

Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity | Richard Dawkins | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "...the Holy See's claim to statehood is founded on a Faustian deal in which Benito Mussolini handed over 1.2 square miles of central Rome in exchange for church support of his fascist regime."



From the 2008 Games, can't believe I didn't hear about this before.  Made of Awesome.  be-a-shreddedkunt-or-die-mirin: ... - Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight.: "German Olympic weightlifter Matthias Steiner promised his wife that one day he would win a gold medal in the Olympics. Just a month before the competition, his wife tragically died in a car accident. In order to break the record, he needed to beat his personal record by more than 2o kg. This is the video of his attempt at the gold medal."

Obama officials refuse to say if assassination power extends to US soil | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "The Justice Department "white paper" purporting to authorize Obama's power to extrajudicially execute US citizens was leaked three weeks ago. Since then, the administration - including the president himself and his nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan - has been repeatedly asked whether this authority extends to US soil, i.e., whether the president has the right to execute US citizens on US soil without charges. In each instance, they have refused to answer. Brennan has been asked the question several times as part of his confirmation process. Each time, he simply pretends that the question has not been asked, opting instead to address a completely different issue."


The Voluntaryist Art of Not Debating | Strike-The-Root: A Journal Of Liberty: "Whenever someone who holds a perceptual belief is challenged by a different or opposing view, the result is almost invariably that the affronted person becomes even more resistant to change – regardless of how cogent, rational, or objective the case being made might be. Emotionally, they dig in their heels and will go to almost any length from that point forward to defend their self-constructed system, no matter how much cognitive dissonance they must engage in to rationalize it. Very quickly, we find that the old adage, “The man convinced against his will, holds to his opinion still,” holds true. Debating such individuals – and it must be noted this represents the vast majority of society – is not only for the most part fruitless, but worse, it is actively counterproductive."


Joe Biden/No Clue - Good Shotguns Are Used in Crimes More Often Than Evil 'Assault Weapons' - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "On the same day that Biden lauded shotguns as the ideal weapons for home defense, a young man used one to murder three people in the Los Angeles area. In fact, shotguns are used in crimes considerably more often than the "assault weapons" that Biden and Feinstein say pose an intolerable threat to public safety. A 2004 study sponsored by the National Institute of Justice estimated that "assault weapons" (mostly pistols) were used in something like 2 percent of gun crimes before they were banned by a federal law that expired that year. By comparison, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, shotguns were used in 5 percent of gun crimes in 1993, the year before Congress passed the "assault weapon" ban. In a 1997 survey of state and federal prison inmates, 7 percent of those who had carried a firearm while committing the crime for which they were serving time said it was a military-style semiautomatic, while 13 percent said it was a shotgun."


How Dennis Tito could send humans to Mars and back by 2020: "Late last night, word began circulating that entrepreneur Dennis Tito — who, in 2001, became the world's first space tourist — intends to launch a privately backed mission to Mars in 2018. Details will be announced next week, but initial reports indicate that the expedition will be round-trip and last 501 days."

Jon Stewart Hammers John McCain On Hagel, Benghazi Outrage; Calls Out Iraq Hypocrisy


"Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy

The art of communicating with the people—public relations—is a notoriously messy business, involving a mixture of persuasion and selective editing, if not outright deception. The art of communicating with foreign publics—sometimes called public diplomacy—is even more fraught. The inherent contradiction in promoting freedom through propaganda is at the heart of Justin Hart’s new book, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy.

Hart, a Texas Tech historian, chronicles America’s mid-century efforts to sell itself to the rest of the world. Empire of Ideas tracks government P.R. successes and failures, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America in the 1930s, through the propaganda efforts of World War II, into the early Cold War struggle with Russia for the hearts and minds of the world, leading to the creation of the United States Information Agency in 1953...

In fact, what we generally think of as America’s most successful international outreach campaign, the massive aid program for postwar Europe known as the Marshall Plan, ended up as a P.R. fiasco. The plan was intended to stabilize and cement U.S. relations with the continent. In this it was successful. But one of its many unintended consequences was to link America with Western Europe’s colonial interests in the eyes of the rest of the world by propping up countries, such as France and Great Britain, that still maintained vast overseas holdings. People in Vietnam or Iraq couldn’t help but notice that, as Hart points out, “there was no Marshall Plan for Africa or the Middle East.…There was simply no good way to spin these facts.”

...So rather than conquering the world through force of arms, the U.S. would convert the world to capitalism, democracy, and the American way of life, all while trying to stop or slow the spread of communism. Thus America would “manage without ruling, or perhaps…rule without managing.”
In some sense, America seems perfectly suited for this kind of large-scale salesmanship. The U.S. was, after all, the home of Madison Avenue, where modern advertising techniques were being pioneered. Mad men, such as ad executive and later Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs William Benton, were central to the U.S. public diplomacy effort...

The difficulty in these and other foreign propaganda efforts is that there is no wall separating the public at home from the public abroad. Foreign audiences have access to messages disseminated for domestic consumption...

America can’t avoid engagement with the rest of the world. But if diplomatic conversations are to be fruitful, they require listening as well as speaking. Creating effective propaganda aimed at, say, the Muslim world means figuring out what the Muslim world wants to hear. But saying what foreigners want to hear is not necessarily going to go over well with American voters who—naturally enough—expect their government to pander exclusively to them..."


How to Meet People Through Fitness | Nerd Fitness: "It is said you are the average of the five people with whom you associate most. Take a few minutes and think who those five people are.  Depending on your age, marital status, and job, this is most likely a combination of friends, family, and coworkers.  So really think about these people: Are they healthy? Are they successful? Do they exercise? Are they HAPPY? Every day you spend time with these people, and part of their personality will rub off on you (and vice versa).  All too often I’ve found that Nerd Fitness readers tend to fall into the category of being the ONLY person in their group of five interested in getting healthy; they are the only person that has decided to make a life change. This presents a conundrum..."

The cat was fine, laugh away...




This.  Is.  Awesome.
"A person will very often get to a point where they'll say 'I've exhausted my potential.  I can't do any more.  There's nothing more I can do.'  But the lesson of The Batman, to me as a kid, was 'You know what?  You haven't even begun.'"

Training.

2/22 - P90X2 D12 X2 Yoga -- burpees [gtg] 8x10/6x6 [made up missed days, back to 38/day for the rest of Feb] -- pullups 3x10/1x15 partials -- chinups 3x8/1x15 partials -- isometrics push/pull/squat 3x10cnt -- band shrugs 2x20, inverted shrugs 2x10


Thursday, February 21, 2013

Training.

2/21 - P90X2 D11 X2 Total Body & X2 Ab Ripper




Today's Internets.

Dolphins May Call Each Other by Name | Wired Science | Wired.com: "What might dolphins be saying with all those clicks and squeaks? Each other’s names, suggests a new study of the so-called signature whistles that dolphins use to identify themselves. Whether the vocalizations should truly be considered names, and whether dolphins call to compatriots in a human-like manner, is contested among scientists, but the results reinforce the possibility. After all, to borrow the argot of animal behavior studies, people often greet friends by copying their individually distinctive vocal signatures. “They use these when they want to reunite with a specific individual,” said biologist Stephanie King of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “It’s a friendly, affiliative sign.” In their new study, published Feb. 19 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, King and fellow St. Andrews biologist Vincent Janik investigate a phenomenon they first described in 2006: bottlenose dolphins recognizing the signature whistles of other dolphins they know."



HEALTHYLICIOUS LIVING | rashidatowe: So today’s convo went like this:...: "Rashidat how do you stay motivated to keep working out and eating right, I keep falling off?  My answer:  THE FU*K! I fall off all the damn time! I had a half of a cake just last week and I didn’t even workout the entire weekend. But, no need to revisit the past and allow that to destroy me. I take it one day at a time baby and create myself new along the way. "


A.M. Links: Hacking Drones, Dope Busts Kids Out of College, Asset Forfeiture for Everything - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Drones aren't just creepy and homicide-y; the Government Accountability Office frets that they're vulnerable to crashes and to being taken over by hackers."


Another reason comics are awesome - Warren Ellis » Boiling Spacetime: How Time Works In The Graphic Novel: "I’m friends with a futurist named Jamais Cascio, and he had occasion early in 2010 to meet a very eminent scientist and author. As these people do, they got to talking about The Future, and a scenario was described wherein Type III civilisations would have the technology to “boil spacetime,” creating or accessing a new universe for itself or even returning to the beginning of the universe in order to have all of time over again to live in. Me and all our friends were running around yelling BOILING SPACETIME for several months. Grant Morrison once described for me – and this is back around 1989 – his experience of discovering, while in the grip of severe entheogenic refreshment, that a comic is an entire spacetime continuum, capable of replay, non-linear access and chronological isolation. Comics boil spacetime. This is metatextual gibberish intended to prime your brain for what is next. Time in comics is completely elastic."

"Still doing it wrong, Joe."

The Sugar-Cancer Connection | Iron Man Magazine: "Bottom Line Health featured an intriguing article titled, “The Sugar-Cancer Link: Overdoing Sweet Foods May Cause Tumors to Grow,” by Patrick Quillin, Ph.D., R.D. “There is growing scientific evidence that consistently high levels of blood sugar may be linked to an increased risk for, and faster progression of, some cancers,” QuilIan states emphatically. Essentially he makes the case that reducing your intake of processed sugars and refined carbohydrates could reduce cancer risk and enhance cancer treatment. In fact, according to an article I saw online, the ketogenic diet is one of the best ways to prevent many cancers—and is the best diet for those in treatment for the disease. I had to consult our resident researchers, Jerry Brainum, on that. He agreed that getting rid of insulin-spiking carbs makes sense in fighting cancer, but he also stressed that you don’t want to avoid fruit."


Yes, they are using science and media and manipulation.  Be aware.  It's still your responsibility what you put in your piehole.  Processed food = not good for you.  End of story.
"What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns."

...In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating...

...the food industry already knew some things about making people happy — and it started with sugar. Many of the Prego sauces — whether cheesy, chunky or light — have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half-cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has the equivalent of more than two teaspoons of sugar, as much as two-plus Oreo cookies.

...This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives. 

... He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”"

On that note, some great food pyramids, any of which would serve you and your health well, from this excellent article - Primal North: Full Circle: The Futility of the Perfect Health Diet:






Or you could eat like Brian Shaw, the Strongest Man in the World : The New Yorker: "In the past five years, Shaw has added more than a hundred pounds to the svelte three hundred that he weighed at his first contest. “It gets old, it really does,” he said. “Sometimes you’re not hungry, but you have to eat anyway. Training is easy compared to that.” Pudzianowski once told an interviewer that his typical breakfast consisted of ten eggs and two to three pounds of bacon. “Between meals, I eat lots of candy,” he said. Shaw prefers to eat smaller portions every two hours or so, for maximum absorption, supplemented by “gainer shakes” of concentrated protein. (“His one shake is twelve hundred calories,” his girlfriend, a former model for Abercrombie & Fitch, told me. “That’s my intake for the entire day.”)"




Meme War!

"Good Girl Gina" vs "Scumbag Stacey" -- I laughed.