Today's Internets.

I am a creationist. God was created by man.:

"Billy has separated his food.  He is an obsessive.  Maybe he writes computer programs."

Training.

3/1 - Russian Pullup Program D8 14/12/10/8/8 -- P90X2 D19 X2 Yoga -- superset chins/dips 3x8

Awesome.

Today's Internets.

Winning on many levels - Made these for the WBC protest earlier today. : reddit.com:

Strength Training 101 | Nerd Fitness: "First of all, lets face it: Putting everything else aside, life is EASIER when you’re strong.  Carrying groceries? One trip. Children to carry? No problem. Car stuck in the snow? Push it out with ease. Plus, whether you’re 100 lbs overweight or just need to lose the last 15, strength training is one of the most effective ways to burn fat and build muscle. Lifting has been shown to halt and even reverse sarcopenia – the reduction of skeletal muscle that occurs as we get older  - which helps us stay independent (and out of a nursing home) and live longer..."

Bradley Manning: the face of heroism | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: ""Manning's motivations in leaking, he said, was to 'spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general', he said, and 'cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.' "Manning explain[ed] his actions that drove him to disclose what he said he 'believed, and still believe . . . are some of the most significant documents of our time' . . . . "He came to view much of what the Army told him — and the public — to be false, such as the suggestion the military had destroyed a graphic video of an aerial assault in Iraq that killed civilians, or that WikiLeaks was a nefarious entity. . . . "Manning said he often found himself frustrated by attempts to get his chain of command to investigate apparent abuses detailed in the documents Manning accessed. . . ."

Manning explained that he was leaking because he wanted the world to know what he had learned: "I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." When asked by the informant why he did not sell the documents to a foreign government for profit - something he obviously could have done with ease - Manning replied that he wanted the information to be publicly known in order to trigger "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms". He described how he became deeply disillusioned with the Iraq War he had once thought noble, and this caused him to re-examine all of his prior assumptions about the US government. And he extensively narrated how he had learned of serious abuse and illegality while serving in the war - including detaining Iraqi citizens guilty of nothing other than criticizing the Malaki government - but was ignored when he brought those abuses to his superiors.

...Manning is absolutely right when he said today that the documents he leaked "are some of the most significant documents of our time". They revealed a multitude of previously secret crimes and acts of deceit and corruption by the world's most powerful factions. Journalists and even some government officials have repeatedly concluded that any actual national security harm from his leaks is minimal if it exists at all. To this day, the documents Manning just admitted having leaked play a prominent role in the ability of journalists around the world to inform their readers about vital events."

Dennis Rodman will save us all.

Bob Woodward embodies US political culture in a single outburst | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "As Brian Beutler points out: "the obscure type of budget document Woodward's referring to is called a duly enacted law — passed by Congress, signed by the President — and the only ways around it are for Congress to change it. . . . or for Obama to break it." But that's exactly what Woodward is demanding: that Obama trumpet his status as Commander-in-Chief in order to simply ignore - i.e. break - the law, just like those wonderful men before him would have done. Woodward derides the law as some petty, trivial annoyance ("this piece of paper") and thus mocks Obama's weakness for the crime of suggesting that the law is something he actually has to obey.

How ironic that this comes from the reporter endlessly heralded for having brought down Richard Nixon's presidency on the ground that Nixon believed himself above the law. Nixon's hallmark proclamation - "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal" - is also apparently Bob Woodward's.

...All of this, of course, is pure pretense. Is it even remotely plausible that Obama is refraining from engaging in military action he believes is necessary out of some sort of quaint deference to the law? Please. This is a president who continued to wage war, in Libya, not merely without Congressional authorization, but even after Congress expressly voted against its authorization. This is a president who has repeatedly argued that he has the right to kill anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, not only due to Congressional authorization but also his own Commander-in-Chief powers. If Obama really wanted to deploy that second aircraft carrier, he would do so, knowing that journalists like Bob Woodward and members of both parties would cheer him. This is just a flamboyant political stunt designed to dramatize how those Big, Bad Republicans are leaving us all exposed and vulnerable with sequestration cuts."

I don't care, that's just funny.

Greg Rucka, FTW.

Training.

2/28 - Russian Pullup Program D7 14/12/10/8/6 [skipped D6 Rest Day] -- P90X2 D18 X2 Total Body & X2 Ab Ripper

THIS.

Today's Internets.

RIP.

Dutch Kickboxing Legend Ramon Dekkers Passes Away at Age 43 | LiverKick.com: "...reports have surfaced that legendary Dutch striker Ramon "Diamond" Dekkers has passed away today at the young age of 43."

Pretty cool.

Female Super Hero Fan Film on Vimeo: 

Cops being unnecessarily dickish/fighting the future.

Is 'Free' Marijuana in Exchange for 'Donations' Legal in Colorado? - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Colorado Springs Police Lt. Mark Comte, who works in the Metro Vice, Narcotics, and Intelligence Division, replied: If I show up at your house with less than an ounce of marijuana, I'm 21, you're 21, and I say, "Hey dude, it cost me 50 bucks in gas to get over here," and you give me 50 bucks for my gas, there's nothing illegal. I mean, you and I both know what's going on with it, but they know what the loopholes are right now. 

...Yet the day before that comment appeared, The Denver Post reports, "two undercover Colorado Springs detectives organized a marijuana purchase from Billygoatgreen as part of an investigation into the service" that resulted in the arrest of three men running it, who now face felony charges punishable by long prison terms. No fair, says one of those men, Pritchard Garrett, who tells the Post that Comte "green-lighted this delivery business" in the Independent article, which he says sent potential customers a clear message: "Hey, the cops said this wasn't illegal, so call them up." Comte stands by his comments, saying Billygoatgreen delivered more than an ounce at a time to the detectives: 1.6 ounces on the first occasion, 2.1 ounces on the second.""

Elizabeth Warren to Ben Bernanke: Big Banks Should Pay for Being Too Big to Fail - Hit & Run : Reason.com:

Gun Control Laws Increasingly Irrelevant as 3D Printed Rifle Receiver Fires Hundreds of Rounds - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "On Monday, with little fanfare and less comment — primarily because none was needed — Defense Distributed unveiled a 3D-printed lower receiver for an AR-15 that stood up to hundreds of rounds of fire. Succinctly, the video on Youtube was accompanied by the statement, "Does not fail from firing stresses. 600+ rounds." Just as important, and the purpose of all this effort, the group made plans for the receiver available for download by all and sundry at DefCad. Defense Distributed's video and 3D printer plans are a clever and powerful blow to politicians' efforts to restrict Americans' abilities to own the means of self-defense. They may also be a glimpse of a future in which human liberty is largely dependent on an ability to limit the reach of the state through technological innovation and grassroots defiance."

K-1, doing business in Japan, kickboxing & the Yakuza.

Q & A with Cro Cop’s former manager: The Man Who Brought Down PRIDE Part 1 | LiverKick.com: "Kazuyoshi Ishii was the founder and emperor of K-1. Around Ishii were a loosely organized structure of sycophants and fixers who all sought Ishii’s favors. Ishii’s English was limited, and so each fighter and their managers had different people to work with. When Ishii later was convicted for tax fraud, before he went to jail, all these sycophants engaged in a power and favor war with Ishii to be appointed as the head of K-1. The major guys were Sadaharu Tanikawa, who as an ex pro wrestling magazine editor who was mainly in charge of fight media liaison for K-1; Ken Imai who handled foreign promoters and some foreign fighters and Seiya Kawamata who handled K-1’s relations with the yakuza..."

Marilyn Monroe, cute & talented, sure, but not exactly a role-model what with the drug abuse, three divorces, repeatedly getting knocked up and having abortions and a probable OD [unless the Kennedys knocked her off...]

Well, the oft Facebook'ed quote always bugged me, and couldn't exactly say why.  All too often the ladies throwing it out there are a hot mess.

Why wouldn’t he take her call when she was drunk? | Dalrock: "I know girls love the Marilyn Monroe quote “If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best” and I don’t know what MM’s “worst” was, but… The girls that say that quote today haven’t taken into account this perspective: “Your worst sucks, is unacceptable, and you are hereby rejected and disqualified for being an unwise, undisciplined, errant fool. Your ‘best’ is unimpressive and disappointing as well.”"

The Night Planet Liberalism Turned on Bob Woodward - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "It has been a special night on Twitter for those of us who take a perverse interest in the way that ideologically aligned journalists and politicos will pack-attack critics of a sitting American president. Seems that Washington Post investigative-journalism legend Bob Woodward crossed a bridge too far when, in talking about reaction to his narrative-debunking Feb. 22 piece pinning the origination of the sequester directly on a White House that had vociferously denied paternity, has now gone on to dish on a "senior White House official" (later identified as White House Economic Council Director Gene Sperling) who "yelled at me for about a half hour" about the op-ed, and warned that "I think you will regret staking out that claim."

Sperling's "threat" (if you can call it that) ranks a bit low on the things-to-be-worried-about totem pole, and Woodward is hardly an infallible source (here's my 2006 column comparing him to Judith Miller), but the reaction tonight from the leftosphere has been something to behold..."

From Woodward's peice:

Bob Woodward: Obama’s sequester deal-changer - The Washington Post: "My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government. Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved. Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise..."

What witchcraft is this?!

Arsenio Hall Late-Night Talk Show Cleared For Fall 2013 Debut: "Two decades after Arsenio Hall‘s successful turn as a late-night syndicated talk show host, he is at it again. The actor-comedian has signed a deal with CBS TV Distribution for a syndicated late-night talk strip for fall 2013."

Cindy Ras Creative | WWSJD?:

Training.

2/27 - Russian Pullup Program D5 12/12/10/8/6 -- burpees x50 4:42, x15 55s, x15 62s, x10 36s, x10 36s -- P90X2 D17 Recovery & Mobility

Awesome - Bodybuilding | nutrisupsworldwide: between phase 2 and phase 3 one thing - HARD WORK!:

Today's Internets.

Awesome acapella cover.

Fat Head » Review: Rich Foods Poor Foods: "A friend of mine once lectured me on why I shouldn’t buy milk unless I was sure it came from a cow that wasn’t treated with hormones.  The lecture might’ve gone on longer, but she had to step outside to smoke a cigarette.  I kid you not. When it comes to improving health, I believe in tackling the big issues first and foremost — like quitting smoking before worrying if your milk came from a hormone-free cow.  If we could just convince people to give up sugar, refined grains and chemically-extracted seed oils (the dietary equivalents of smoking, in my opinion), they’d already be far along the path to improved health, even if they buy their meats and eggs at Wal-Mart."

This is great.

Supreme Court shields warrantless eavesdropping law from constitutional challenge | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "The Obama justice department succeeded in convincing the five right-wing Supreme Court justices to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, which vastly expanded the government's authority to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. In the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion, released today, which adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ, while the Court's four less conservative justices (Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) all dissented. This means that the lawsuit is dismissed without any ruling on whether the US government's new eavesdropping powers violate core constitutional rights."

How Not to Withdraw from Afghanistan - By Jim McDermott and Lawrence Wilkerson | Foreign Policy: "Eleven years of costly war have confirmed that there is no military solution in Afghanistan." -- No. Shit.

Is the US maintaining death squads and torture militias in Afghanistan? | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "In 2010, as WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to the conduct of the US government, government defenders dismissively claimed that they revealed nothing new. Among the many documents disproving that claim were ones relating to a US policy in Iraq set forth in "Frago 242", which ordered coalition troops not to stop or even investigate torture and other war crimes by the Iraqi forces they were training, but simply to "note" them...

In Afghanistan on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai alleged that the US is doing something much worse: not merely standing by and watching their trained forces torture and kill, but actively and systematically participating. As the Guardian's Golnar Motevalli reported: "The Afghan government has ordered US special forces to leave one of Afghanistan's most restive provinces, Maidan Wardak, after receiving reports from local officials claiming that the elite units had been involved in the torture and disappearance of Afghan civilians...

A 2009 Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, found as follows regarding Afghanistan:

Dennis Rodman will fix everything.

Dennis Rodman Arrives in North Korea for Tour - NYTimes.com: "Dennis Rodman may not come across as the most natural choice for a sports star turned American diplomat, but North Korea apparently begs to differ. Rodman has traveled to Pyongyang along with three Harlem Globetrotters and a documentary film crew for some basketball exhibitions and, the film company hopes, an audience with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who is said to be a devoted basketball fan."

I have been, literally, on this street.  Odd, the random things that turn up in my RSS feed.

The comments are the best part of this article.

Between Seth MacFarlane and the Onion, Oscars night was a festival of misogyny | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian:  "...we aren't going to stop telling jokes just to make you feel comfortable. The world does not revolve around your feelings. And your feelings certainly do not trump my right to free speech."

And a lengthier retort.  I am so sick and tired of the perpetually and professionally offended.

The Oscar “Fallout” Is A Sham: "Apparently the author and Merriam-Webster have taken a break, because I fail to see any part of the Oscars that exemplified a hatred or dislike of women.  Nor did I see any hostility to women in the workplace.  Wait, perhaps the heretic boob song?  Yes, that must be it.  As she explains: "We Saw Your Boobs” was as a song-and-dance routine in which MacFarlane and some grinning guys named actresses in the audience and the movies in which their breasts were visible. That’s about it."

EXACTLY.  “That’s about it.”  A recitation of facts wherein MacFarlane simply stated the name of the actress, the movie she showed her breasts in, and a chorus of literally “we saw your boobs.”  Yet somehow Davidson ascribes not only an ill-natured undertone to it, but an active “hostility” towards women in the workplace.  These actresses willingly took off their clothes for their movie roles.  Why not be proud of your genetic prowess and show off your aesthetically blessed parts for the world to see? What’s difficult for women who are not revered for their looks to understand is that women enjoy this attention.  Attractive women like to feel attractive.  Not surprisingly one of the more attractive winners of the night agreed to be part of the skit, showing a pre-recorded feigned surprise (Jennifer Lawrence) at the song..."

There's no such thing as complete safety, let alone a 'safe-space.'

JOSHUTOWN? | Hardcore Zen: "But there is an unstated undercurrent in this demand for safety that bothers me. I feel like one of the most important lessons of the Sasaki case is not that students need to be provided with a perfectly safe environment. It’s that responsibility goes both ways. It is very dangerous to suggest this. If you do you will be accused, as I have been, of excusing the perpetrators and blaming the victims. I do not blame the victims for what they suffered...

The problem is we can’t have an environment so safe that we adults can ever let go and fall backwards into a fluffy warm state of infant-like trust. Babies have no choice but to place their total trust in their parents. Sometimes this trust is misplaced. But babies are powerless to do anything about that. So society steps in and tries to make sure that all parents treat their babies well. Adults don’t have that option. No matter how many committees “with teeth” we put into place to try and make it that way. Again, I often wish we did. In Japan, where I lived for 11 years, many adults place a ridiculous amount of trust in the government to be like surrogate parents. After the debacle following the 2011 tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster a lot of that trust is gone. Which is a good thing."

Hawaiian libertarian: Soluble Synergy: "Eating as much healthy fats in your diet as you can is the key to your health and well being. Fats lead to satiety, nutrient absorption and most importantly of all, protection. The healthy fats will make you thrive. They will protect you from the worst effects of other junk food, alcohol consumption and other poisons you may ingest. The healthy fats protect your liver and give your body the best material to work with when it has to manufacture the hormones, neuro-transmitters, and other substances vital for healthy living."

Fuck the police.  Seriously.

Man Charged With Felony for Letting Go of Balloons - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A 40-year-old man faces felony charges after releasing a dozen heart-shaped, helium-filled balloons to impress his sweetheart...

Other third degree felonies include: aggravated assault, repeated drinking and driving, battery on a law enforcement officer, cocaine possession, and failure to return a rental car."

It's true.

Whedonverse Gifs:

From the comments...

 Sequester Facts to Know Before Committing Suicide - Reason.com: "Let some small thing happen that you actually initiated back in 2011, but campaigned against as it was finally coming to fruition in 2013. Blame the GOP for it happening, and then blame all of the subsequent bad consequences of all your other shitty policies on this extremely small to the point of being nearly non-existent cut in the rate of growth of spending. It is idiocy in action. But politically, it's almost brilliant."

Where Does a Cop With an 80-Pound Dog Search? - Reason.com: "Imagine that a police officer, after taking it upon himself to search someone's car, is asked to explain why he thought he would find contraband there. "A little birdie told me," he replies.

Most judges would react with appropriate skepticism to such a claim. But substitute "a big dog" for "a little birdie," and you've got probable cause.  Or so says the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week unanimously ruled that "a court can presume" a search is valid if police say it was based on an alert by a dog trained to detect drugs. The Court thereby encouraged judges to accept self-interested proclamations about a canine's capabilities, reinforcing the alarmingly common use of dogs to justify invasions of privacy.  Drug-detecting dogs are much less reliable than widely believed, with false-positive error rates as high as 96 percent in the field. A 2006 Australian study found that the rate of unverified alerts by 17 police dogs used to sniff out drugs on people ranged from 44 percent to 93 percent. 

Police and prosecutors commonly argue that when a dog alerts and no drugs are found "the dog may not have made a mistake at all," as Justice Elena Kagan put it, writing for the Court. Instead it "may have detected substances that were too well hidden or present in quantities too small for the officer to locate."  This excuse is very convenient—and completely unfalsifiable. Furthermore, probable cause is supposed to hinge on whether there is a "fair probability" that a search will discover evidence of a crime. The possibility that dogs will react to traces of drugs that are no longer present makes them less reliable for that purpose."

Science!

Training.

2/26 - Russian Pullup Program D4 12/10/10/8/6 - burpees x14 - P90X2 D16 Plyocide

Today's Internets.

What the Dangerous Low-Fat Diet Looked Like | DietDoctor.com: "The low-fat diet just lost another huge trial, resulting in significantly more heart disease than a higher-fat Mediterranean diet. It lost badly enough that the trial was stopped in advance, as it was considered unethical to let the low-fat diet group continue to eat like that.

...These are the common low-fat guidelines that hundreds of millions of people have been trying to follow for decades, as they’ve been told it would protect them from heart disease.

Unfortunately this is just the latest in a long line of studies proving that the regular low-fat diet is not only useless to people. It’s actually harmful."

Does John Kerry Matter? - By David Rothkopf | Foreign Policy: "You wouldn't know it from all the handwringing on Capitol Hill or media navel-gazing about cabinet choices, but neither Kerry nor his eventual counterpart at the Pentagon is likely to change very much at all about the administration's international agenda. This is true to some degree because, as just noted, the policymaker-in-chief remains the same guy supported by the same team in the same place. But it is also true because the important drivers of that agenda are beyond the control of the top guys in Foggy Bottom or at the Pentagon."

Better at the link/with the gifs - Gifted(lol) | tyleroakley: I AM SCREAMING. (via) Jack...

Truth doesn't matter when dealing with the law - Criticize a Judge (or Anyone Else), Go to Jail? - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "...the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled last month that "the truthfulness of the threatened disclosure is not necessarily relevant to prosecution because the harm, placing a victim in fear, occurs whether the publicized conduct is true or false."

Harlem Shake, Chemotherapy Edition.  Fuck death.

Fat People Don’t Live Longer: Science, Interrupted | Chateau Heartiste: "Remember that meta-analysis study that came out about a month or so ago which purported to show that overweight people live longer than thin people, and remember hearing the groans of joy from diabetic, foot-chopped fatties with zero romantic prospects jumping two centimeters into the air in victory celebration? Remember thinking, “Hm, this study totally contradicts everything I see with my two lying eyes. Something smells fishy, and it isn’t just smegma trapped in some fatty’s stomach folds.” Well, the skeptics and fat antagonizers, like yours truly, were right to doubt the claims of that study. It turns out the methodology of the prior study was terrible, and they included skinny people dying of cancer and AIDS and so on in the calculations.  As stated in the linked article, “These people weren’t dying because they were slim; they were slim because they were dying.”"

Fuuuuuck. 

Meet the Man Who Squats 905…Raw | 70's Big: "This man is Ray Williams. In only his second powerlifting meet, he smashed the American USAPL Squat record with his second attempt, and on his third, easily squatted a weight that would shatter the current IPF world record, were it done in the proper circumstances, with the proper judging, and, of course, assuming he becomes accustomed to waiting for the “rack” command. Did I mention this is his second meet? "

Time reversal findings may open doors to the future: "Imagine a cell phone charger that recharges your phone remotely without even knowing where it is; a device that targets and destroys tumors, wherever they are in the body; or a security field that can disable electronics, even a listening device hiding in a prosthetic toe, without knowing where it is."

Today's Internets.

fuckyeahyoga:

fuckyeahyoga | buddhadoodles: Buddha Doodle - ‘east/west’

Oscar Roundup 2013 (Or As They Call It At My House, Purim) - Hit & Run : Reason.com: 

"2. Michelle Obama announced the Best Picture winner. The losers were dispatched by a drone."

The Department Of Homeland Security Stole My Boat Today | Uncrunched: "What struck me the most about the situation is how excited she got about seizing the boat. Like she was just itching for something like this to happen. This was a very happy day for her. So now I have to hire a lawyer to try to figure all this out. And I will figure it out, eventually. My point in writing this isn’t to whine. Like I said, this will get worked out one way or another. No, it’s to highlight how screwed up our government bureaucracy has become. A person with a gun and a government badge asked me to swear in writing that a lie was true today. And when I didn’t do what she wanted she simply took my boat and asked me to leave. What would you have done? Maybe most people would have just signed the form."

Cardinal Keith O'Brien resigns amid claims of inappropriate behaviour | World news | guardian.co.uk: "Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the UK's most senior Roman Catholic cleric, has resigned with immediate effect after being accused of "inappropriate acts" towards fellow priests. News that Pope Benedict had accepted the cardinal's resignation as archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh came after the Observer disclosed a series of allegations by three priests and one former priest. O'Brien has denied the allegations and had been expected to continue in his post as head of the Scottish Catholic church until mid-March, when he was due to retire at age 75. However, in a statement released by the church on Monday, it emerged that the pope had accepted O'Brien's resignation a week ago, on 18 February."

The Art of Non-Conformity » “I’ve Just Been So Busy Lately”: "Sorry I was rude to you the other day, someone said. I’ve just been so busy. Guess what: we’re all busy! Every one of us. It’s not a very exclusive club. And here’s another reality check: because we’re all busy, no one really cares about how busy someone else is. One way or another, we all make time for what’s important to us.

...The strategies for dealing with being “so busy” are pretty basic: 1) Be less busy. If being busy really prevents you from doing something you want, stop being so busy. It’s not that complicated. 2) Stop complaining and enjoy it. Personally, I like busy. I had fun visiting the islands last week, but islands can be sleepy little places. In Fiji I sat by the pool for an hour, but then I got bored and went back to working on my projects."

The Tactical Virtues of Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor : The Jack Donovan Interview | Heathen Harvest 2.1: "It’s popular now to say that the “1%” make all of the decisions. That’s probably always been the case. What is missing is accountability. Globalism erases local accountability. It’s socially acceptable to sell out your neighbors, because we’re all supposed to be “citizens of the world.” Men are supposed to be glad that some village in Indonesia raised its standard of living, even as the standard of living in their own hometown decreases. We’re told that it’s just “better” that way. Globalism absolves the 1% of any responsibility to the men around them. Men who should be called traitors can claim to be doing God’s work as they fill their pockets.

...The best response to government corruption is not to demand more government oversight. That’s really absurd if you think about it. The best response is to acknowledge that the social contract has been broken and cut the government and the corporations out of the loop. You can’t accomplish that with a protest. You have to start building independent networks of support. Start bartering. Become less dependent on a broken system. 

...Decide who your friends are and worry about how they are doing, and not how the guy in Indonesia is doing. Let his own people worry about him. Humans are tribal. We can’t worry about the whole world. Committing ourselves to the idea that we are “world citizens” makes us easy pawns. You can’t complain about your job being outsourced or your wages being undercut by illegal aliens if you believe you are part of “one world tribe.”

...Tribesmen in loincloths and average suburban teenagers in shopping malls are going to share some sense that strength and courage are related to masculinity. If you look at the cultures where that hasn’t been the case, you’re probably talking about subcultures—like a religious order or pampered aristocrats. Clever guys always give examples like noblemen who wore a lot of lace and frills and powder…but many of these same men also dueled to defend their honor.

...the majority of blockbuster action films feature strong, heroic men performing daring acts to save innocent people, so I have a hard time seeing that as “negative.” Feminists—and the United Nations, apparently—consider any association of violence with masculinity to be “negative.” But that’s woman-think. Men see a man wielding great power for good, and that’s a positive form of masculinity that men have sung songs and written books about for all of human history. 

...There are truly negative examples in mainstream sitcoms and in advertising, especially in anything marketed to women or families. The dad is always a moron, and the magic token minority is somehow always a better person than the average guy, and it’s always the woman who really knows what’s going on. It’s trashy and nakedly political, but how much can your really expect from sitcoms anyway?

...Part of being a man is dealing with reality and being able to say “that guy is just better at that than I will ever be.” You don’t want to limit yourself unnecessarily, and it doesn’t mean that you should give up trying to be better.

...Flamboyantly dishonorable men reject the way that men evaluate each other and try to rewrite the rules in their own favor. It’s the kid who sucks at sports (or something else) and gets picked on, then decides that sports are for jerks anyway, then caricatures and mocks the guys who play sports. It’s more than just “being who you are.” It’s ressentiment.

That seems to be the way people want to deal with things now. If you’re different or have a problem, you demand that the majority of people who aren’t like you change the way they talk or think so that you don’t feel bad. In First World countries, it seems like we are all rewarded for acting like spoiled children. It makes sense to some degree, because spoiled children can never be self-sufficient..."

LOL.  Sexy |: "Sexy isn’t always slutty, but slutty is always sexy.

 ...most women also lack a fundamental understanding of the male sexual impulse...  until women are steeped in 17 times their normal testosterone levels, they will never understand the male experience with regards to sex. When a woman utters the words “I don’t understand why sex is such a big deal for guys”, she’s speaking the truth.

[...it's] Men who’ve classically defined what is sexy and feminine in women. What has historically worked as sexy, and what has been historically confirmed as feminine is defined by the response and effect that particular behavior set evokes from Men. What we consider today as sexy behaviors and appearance were characteristics ‘selected-for’ that endured to become gender indicative aspects of being feminine. The inverse of this is true for women; women define what is sexy in men.

...she wants to define what sexy should be for men using metrics that she is comfortable with. The problem, as with all things fem-centric, is that this social push to redefine for men what they should find sexy slams headlong into Men’s biological imperatives. Despite feminizations incessant efforts to the contrary, we still want to fuck the girl who most closely resembles the Playboy centerfold and our erections are the litmus test..."

Afghanistan bans U.S. special forces from key province | Foreign Policy: "Amid allegations that Afghans employed by U.S. forces had killed and tortured villagers in the area, the government of President Hamid Karzai announced Sunday that it will ban U.S. special forces from operating in Wardak province, a key area just west of Kabul used by the Taliban to stage attacks on the capital."

CIA propaganda film strikes out at the Oscars - Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA and film critics have a very bad evening | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "...then political writers had begun to notice what film critics either failed to detect or just wilfully ignored. The film falsely depicted torture as instrumental in the finding of Osama bin Laden ("what is so unsettling about 'Zero Dark Thirty' is not that it tells this difficult history but, rather, that it distorts it", said the New Yorker's Jane Mayer). Beyond the torture falsehoods, it was a blatant vehicle for CIA propaganda, bolstering a worldview exclusively out of Langley ("This is not a coincidence. The CIA played a key role in shaping the film's narrative," reported BuzzFeed's Michael Hastings; the CIA "couldn't have asked for better product placement", said the New York Times' Timothy Egan; as a result, said The Atlantic's Peter Maass: "Zero Dark Thirty represents a new genre of embedded filmmaking that is the problematic offspring of the worrisome endeavor known as embedded journalism"). In sum, said MSNBC's Chris Hayes, the film "colludes with evil" (a long but very partial list of writers, filmmakers, FBI agents and even government officials who similarly denounced the film is here)."

Of course they also work very hard to make foods as addictive as possible, using the cheapest ingredients, usually with the with the least nutrient density.  All that being said, if you're fat it's still totally your fault responsibility.  

 The Bogus Case Against Junk Food - Reason.com: "You might want to sit down for this. All set? Here it is: Food companies work very, very hard to find out what will give you, the consumer, the most pleasure for your money—and then the diabolical fiends actually give it to you!"

Like most sequels, not as good as the original, but still funny.

Movie: The Movie 2V recreates The Avengers starring armless Bryan Cranston, Jessica Chastain and CG Matt Damon: "Last year (after the Oscars) Jimmy Kimmel created a film that would sweep the Academy Awards starring black Hitler. A year later, Kimmel has pieced together a sequel to that amazing 9-minute trailer, "based on a tweet by Gary Busey and the best-selling board game Jenga." Behold the trailer for Movie: The Movie 2V Starring: Bradley Cooper, Bryan Cranston, John Krasinski, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, Channing Tatum, Jessica Chastain, Gerard Butler, Jason Schwartzman, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Armie Hammer, Kerry Washington, Topher Grace, Bruno Mars, Amanda Seyfried and Matt Damon!"

Science is a tool, not a conclusion.  Use intelligently - T NATION | The Best in Training: "Myth - "Scientific studies prove me correct!" There's a general rule in this industry that you should use whatever scientific study supports your way of thinking and disregard any other study that proves the opposite, citing quackery. Alwyn Cosgrove once said that if you took a lifter and had him perform a 1RM in the bench press, and then later the same day had him perform a full bench press workout complete with assistance lifts followed by having him test his 1RM again, the said lifter would test lower. Thus, you've just proven that weight training makes you weaker. So take each study you read with a huge amount of skepticism and understand that humans always have an agenda."