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.'"
