Saturday, June 22, 2013

Today's Internets - "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - Orwell

"Today, I lost my car keys, so I asked my ex-husband if he still had his spare to my car. He said he'd send it. I got an empty envelope with a troll face on it. There's a reason I left him. FML"

"(386): idk. a stripper just bit me. I'm so disoriented"

"(901): So I just sent my ex a video snap chat of me getting head from some Venezuelan hottie with the caption I still love you. Think she'll take me back?"

 "(202): Never let him bartend when he's tripping. He sprinkled a ton of mexican shredded cheese over a jack and coke and called in a Monterey Jack Daniels."


"Every year white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I’ve heard educated white people say, ‘slavery was 400 years ago.’ No it very wasn’t. It was 140 years ago…  that’s two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That’s how recently you could buy a guy." - Louis C.K.


"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - Orwell
 "Early this morning the New York State Senate approved a bill exempting retired law enforcement officers from a new seven-round limit on the number of rounds people are allowed to have in their guns. "


"There’s an amazing quote from The Lord of the Rings that had a profound effect on me when I first read the books in high school. Basically Frodo is bitching about the predicament they’re in and Gandalf lays down some Old Man Knowledge: 

Frodo: “I wish none of this had happened.” 
Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”   

Being weak is definitely a disparaging situation. Are you going to let your weakness consume you, or are you gonna get up and find that fucking dog? Make a decision to not give a shit what other people are doing; we all start somewhere. Decide to be the best you can god damn be with what you have. God damn it."


Live action Gatchaman/G-Force/Battle of the Planets.  Japan Wins.

"Not much is known yet about the accident that killed journalist Michael Hastings, other than that an eyewitness saw Hastings’ car going at an extremely high speed before the crash. The wreckage suggests Hasting’s car veered out of control onto a median,  clipped a fire hydrant, crashed into a palm tree,  and burned. Perhaps it’s only because I know next to nothing about car crashes that some of this looks weird to me...

Since first posting this, a couple of readers have pointed me to articles indicating that just the explosion itself — if there was one — puts this accident in a very rare class. This is from a ‘How Often Do Cars Really Explode From Impact‘ thread on the AutoshopOwner site...

[Update 2] A commenter claiming to have done a lot of accident clean-ups, doesn’t agree that this is all that unique...

If this had happened to Chris Matthews or David Gregory, this would be looked on as just a freak accident — a happy one, in some circles — but since it was Hastings, one of the few genuinely disruptive journalists to have emerged in the past several years, chills have no doubt run up a lot of spines. LA Weekly barely conceals these suspicions in this article on how Hastings had recently turned his attention toward the CIA. The article concedes that “That stretch of Highland Avenue [where the crash took place] is notorious for its late-night crashes involving DUI drivers” while noting that “Tuesday at 4:25 a.m. would probably stick out as an unusual time for such a case.”

...The Weekly also reports that Hastings once described himself as ”a recovering drunk/addict/screw-up” and that in his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story, Hastings wrote that he crashed a car in a drunk driving accident when he was 19. Contrary to prior reports, Hastings’ body has not yet been officially identified, according to The Weekly. The Weekly also notes the proliferation of conspiracy theories that have found some support in Hastings writing – In Hastings 2012 book The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, Hastings says a McChrystal staffer said to him, “We’ll hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write.” In the same book Hastings says he hasn’t had a drink in 10 years...

Just for the record, I am not advancing a theory here. I noticed a lot of people who I don’t consider knee-jerk conspiracists were made particularly uncomfortable by Hastings death, especially when details of the accident emerged. Predictably, there was the customarily strong push to belittle these suspicions with talk of tinfoil hats and conspiracy theories and nutjobs.

Though I don’t generally embrace most conspiracy theories, I also don’t find knee-jerk anti-conspiracism any more thoughtful or satisfying if it isn’t predicated on something weightier than the assumed essential decency of the state and its agents, or presumed knowingness about how conspiracies work or don’t. This has always struck me as a form of exceptionalism that ignores both our own domestic history and this country’s foreign policy now and in the past. I don’t think reflexive, a-historic, exceptionalist defenses of the state are something that radicals should countenance without grounds, particularly when these defenses aim to belittle and stigmatize people who are more suspicious. To me it is far more realistic to credit the state with limitless ruthlessness in maintaining control — even with flawed theories — than to keep insisting that everything wrong is ‘right out in the open.’"

"Here's Obama the Presidential Candidate debating Obama the Second Term President on surveillance; note how Obama the younger smashes through the cheap "privacy vs security" rhetoric of Obama the elder, showing the man for a thoroughly co-opted cynic who'll let the nation's spooks run wild."
[From the comments]:
 "I'm willing to bet that the reason candidate Obama and president Obama are so different is that he's learned a lot of dangerous secrets about the world that we aren't told about. Idealism in the face of reality frequently suffers." 
[I despise this argument, because...]
"Bull shit.  What "dangerous secrets" did he learn?  That some terrorist tried to blow up a plane or use a car bomb?  Oh no!  Dozens of Americans might have died.  If the framers had known that dozens of Americans might die, surely they would not have stuck the fourth amendment in there.  Holy fucking shit. The US faced an existential threat in the USSR, an empire that influenced over half the world, had billions of people, equivalent technology, and weapons to literally kill us all, and we managed to (for the most part) keep our shit together.  Now we face a few thousand  religious nuts and we full on surrender?  Are we cowards, or just fucking stupid? If we want to act like a bunch of fucking cowards in the face of a non-threat, we should at least openly declare our cowardice and repeal the fourth amendment.  Better to be a coward than a hypocrite and a coward."


"This can't happen in America? Yeah. And the government can't listen to your phone calls, either."


"They have a backlog of hundreds of millions of pages marked for possible declassification, and they’re able to release those that don’t reveal information about weapons of mass destruction, harm diplomatic relations or threaten the safety of the president of the United States. But no one believes they’ll be able to make a year-end deadline set by President Barack Obama. And in the meantime, the government is classifying even more secrets. After three and half years, just 70 million pages have been released, including the Pentagon Papers and a World War I-era recipe for secret ink. Another 45 million pages have been kept classified. The rest have yet to be fully processed. (Because the material is more than 25 years old, it’s paper and not the disks, microfilm and emails that came later.) “It’s not going to happen,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, and is an expert on – and prominent critic of – government secrecy. “That should be a signal to everyone that the system is broken. Not even the president can make it work.”

Meanwhile, the government can’t keep up with the ever-escalating onslaught of classified documents, which are accumulating faster than ever before because of the growing bureaucracy, switch to electronic data and a prevailing culture of secrecy. Each day, federal agencies spend more time, money and effort classifying documents than declassifying them. In fiscal year 2011, about 2,400 employees classified documents and only hundreds declassified them, according to the most recent statistics available – which exclude the backlog – from the Information Security Oversight Office. They classified information 92 million times and declassified it only 27 million times. They spent more than $11 billion to classify documents at 41 agencies – more than double the amount a decade ago – and only $53 million on declassification. (The entire tab for classification is unknown because the cost at certain intelligence agencies is, in fact, classified.)"



 "Who is actually bringing 'injury to America': those who are secretly building a massive surveillance system or those who inform citizens that it's being done?

The US government has charged Edward Snowden with three felonies, including two under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute enacted to criminalize dissent against World War I. My priority at the moment is working on our next set of stories, so I just want to briefly note a few points about this. Prior to Barack Obama's inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That's because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?

For a politician who tried to convince Americans to elect him based on repeated pledges of unprecedented transparency and specific vows to protect "noble" and "patriotic" whistleblowers, is this unparalleled assault on those who enable investigative journalism remotely defensible? Recall that the New Yorker's Jane Mayer said recently that this oppressive climate created by the Obama presidency has brought investigative journalism to a "standstill", while James Goodale, the General Counsel for the New York Times during its battles with the Nixon administration, wrote last month in that paper that "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom." Read what Mayer and Goodale wrote and ask yourself: is the Obama administration's threat to the news-gathering process not a serious crisis at this point?

...Few people - likely including Snowden himself - would contest that his actions constitute some sort of breach of the law. He made his choice based on basic theories of civil disobedience: that those who control the law have become corrupt, that the law in this case (by concealing the actions of government officials in building this massive spying apparatus in secret) is a tool of injustice, and that he felt compelled to act in violation of it in order to expose these official bad acts and enable debate and reform. But that's a far cry from charging Snowden, who just turned 30 yesterday, with multiple felonies under the Espionage Act that will send him to prison for decades if not life upon conviction. In what conceivable sense are Snowden's actions "espionage"? He could have - but chose not - sold the information he had to a foreign intelligence service for vast sums of money, or covertly passed it to one of America's enemies, or worked at the direction of a foreign government. That is espionage. He did none of those things.

What he did instead was give up his life of career stability and economic prosperity, living with his long-time girlfriend in Hawaii, in order to inform his fellow citizens (both in America and around the world) of what the US government and its allies are doing to them and their privacy. He did that by very carefully selecting which documents he thought should be disclosed and concealed, then gave them to a newspaper with a team of editors and journalists and repeatedly insisted that journalistic judgments be exercised about which of those documents should be published in the public interest and which should be withheld. That's what every single whistleblower and source for investigative journalism, in every case, does - by definition. In what conceivable sense does that merit felony charges under the Espionage Act?"

 "Did Snowden break the law? Possibly -- but charging him with espionage is ridiculous, just as it has been ridiculous in many of these cases. Snowden wasn't doing this to "aid the enemy" but to alert the American public to the things that the administration itself had been publicly misleading to downright untruthful about. His actions have kicked off an important discussion and debate over surveillance society and how far it has gone today. That's not espionage. If he was doing espionage, he would have sold those secrets off to a foreign power and lived a nice life somewhere else. To charge him with espionage is insane."


Training.

6/23 - dips 8x8, db press 8x8, overhead tri ext 8x8, db shrugs x50/40/35, neck nods/rotations/dt x35

An excellent reminder that adaptation is specific.  You can be a strong and jacked former NFL player used to short burst high intensity activity, and still get your ass kicked by varying movement patterns and longer duration work.  Also worth noting, for a 42 year old mother of 3 - [No. Excuses.] - Kelly Ripa's kind of a fitness badass. 

Friday, June 21, 2013

Training.

6/22 - pullups 4x8/6+2/3x[5+3], chins x6/4x[5+1]/6, pulldowns 8x8, rows 8x8, hyperx 4x10, alt db curls 4x10, wrist curls 12/10/8, wrist ext 15/12/10

You can do anything.  Just decide.
Fit2Fat2Fit.com ..::..:
"This is my story of how I plan on going from being obsessed with being fit, to fat in 6 months and how I plan on showing everyone how to get back to fit again in 6 more months. My diet will be unrestricted and I will refrain from any exercise during my fat stage. I plan on putting on around 50-60 pounds. After those 6 months, I will be teaching people how to get back in shape by allowing everyone to follow my specific meal plans and workout plans on this site. I will be documenting my progress every step of the way and blogging about it, from weekly pics, measurements, and even allowing people to decide what fatty foods I should partake of during my fat stage."

Training.

6/21 - 20m treadmill, legx 3x10, glute bridge 3x10 -- assisted Amosov squats x50, Gironda frog crunch x50, vacuum 5x10s


Today's Internets - Rack Your Weights.


"When you put an animal in zoo, give it a steady stream of food without the necessity of exercise, three things happen: 1. It goes nuts. 2. It stops reproducing. 3. It gets fat. In a way, it might be nature’s way of making sure that animal doesn’t live on. Well, we’re in the zoo and since there aren’t any bars, we just don’t know it. But we do know all three problems are starting to plague us. Just sit in an airport for a few hours and “people watch” to see just how shallow the gene pool is actually getting...

Come on guys, we sleep 7 – 8 hours a day. Now, in a soft bed with the feet plantar flexed under our fluffy covers, the ankles are going to lock up a bit. Now, that might be ok if we were active and maybe took our shoes off as you will see later, but we don’t walk or move the feet very much. Then, we put on our tight fashionable shoes with a heel lift and wonder what the problem is. The tight soleus and gastrocs put more pressure on the knee and low and behold – we have patello-femoral syndrome to go with our plantar fascitis. Another couple of classic nebulous things no one seems to really understand. Then, when we aren’t in the bed because our knees and feet are killing us, we’re sitting hunched over watching our de-evolution marvel: the TV. This leads to our tight psoas and hammies. We, as a species spend more time sitting than ever. The entire process, our body is molding into the positions we spend the most time in. Tight pecs, lats, ankles and hip flexors…yeah I think we got it...

Are your shoes making you soft and weak? For years people have been calling me “the barefoot guy” since I’ve been preaching about shoe-less training at every seminar I give. My athletes do their speed training, mobility, stretching, and lower-body strength exercises barefoot. Here’s why. Hammer toes? Achilles Tendonitis? Corns? Bunyons? Plantar fascitis? Yeah, take off your shoes. When I was working solely as a physical therapist, one of the areas I could never make a great impact with people was their feet...

After some research, I learned that roughly 25 percent of all the joints in your body are in your feet. If you look at the bone structure and how it’s designed it’s almost identical to your hand. Your feet should actually be fantastic sensors and just as mobile and capable as your hands! The heel pads are designed to get thickened like the sole of the shoe. Yet the prehensile ability and durability of the feet in adults is almost gone since their feet have been shoved in shoes all their lives...

By having my patients and athletes take their shoes off and strengthen their feet, they regained balance and proprioception and their pains virtually disappeared. Now that their feet could move, they had less foot, ankle, knee, hip, lower-back and shoulder problems!  The more you take away the mobility of the foot by taping them up and putting them in further taped up shoes and cleats, that’s where the injuries occur. You might as well cut to the chase and put some cement shoes on and be done with it. You’re not born with shoes on. We’ve been convinced that it’s the shoe on the foot instead of the foot in the shoe that makes the difference. I don’t agree..."

This is awesome.
The most annoying part of not having my PT gear here yet/training in the apt complex gym is the lack of common courtesy in the gym/the inability of people to re-rack weights.  A close second is watching personal "trainers" have their clients doing dumb fucking things.  Third is leaving their junk draped over equipment as they decide to go on walkabout.

"The death of reporter Michael Hastings, best remembered for taking on General Stanley McChrystal and other powerful people, has been met with shock and grief in the journalistic community, especially from those fortunate enough to work alongside him. But one layer below the fond remembrances are a host of vague questions and inferences about the circumstances surrounding the 33-year-old BuzzFeed reporter's fiery solo car crash early Tuesday in Los Angeles. Bringing those suspicions to the forefront last night was WikiLeaks, never reticent to insert itself into a story, which teased, "Michael Hastings death has a very serious non-public complication. We will have more details later." And after three hours tweeted: "Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him." "Yeah," BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith confirmed to Daily Intelligencer. "Before his death, Michael told a number of his friends and colleagues that he was concerned that he was under investigation."

But other, less reputable sources have taken the speculation much further. "Vince Foster-like murder plot emerging in Los Angeles? Did the Obama administration knock off a star reporter?" asked one blog early on Wednesday, adding to existing conspiratorial Twitter chatter. Another wrote, "Admit it, Michael Hastings’ Death is Weird and Scary." Hours before revelations about a potential FBI investigation, InfoWars, the Alex Jones website that serves as a catch-all conspiracy-theory clearing house, mentioned Hastings's death with an editor's note: "Journalists who mess with government and military power often die under mysterious circumstances." None had more than conjecture...

The circumstances are these: "Police said a vehicle was southbound on Highland about 4:20 a.m. when it lost control south of Melrose and smashed into a tree," the L.A. Times reported. Video purports to show Hastings's Mercedes-Benz running a red light at a high speed minutes before the crash. "It sounded like a bomb went off in the middle of the night," a witness told the local news. "I couldn't have written a scene like this for a movie, where the engine flies from the car." Photos and video from the aftermath show extreme wreckage, and as of yesterday, the coroner had not officially identified the body because it was too badly burned."






Thursday, June 20, 2013

Training.

6/20 - dips x20/12/6x10/8, scott press x15/12/6x10/8, ovrxt x15/5x12/2x10/5, db shrugs x40/30/30, neck nod/rot/iso x35

Larissa Reis is hardcore.


Today's Internets - "Only God Can Judge Me." - Tupac

...and there is no god, so it works out.


The crazier Miley Cyrus gets, the more I dig her.
Also, I'm just liking the song, pop culture sellout that I am.
Not to mention the whole "I was forced to be a Disney Channel'fied princess" so now I've decided to say "FUCK.  THAT."


"Let me tell you what it is to be a man: Stand tall.  Stand proud.  Make eye contact.  Say exactly what you mean and mean every word you say.  Don’t defer to the weak. Admire the strong and pity the weak.  Don’t talk, talk, talk all the time.  Speak with authority and conviction.  Never speak about things you know nothing of.  Don’t apologize for the mundane.  Do not be ashamed of the superior and do not make excuses or apologies for the inferior.  Be strong, be proud."

True Story.

"As reported this morning, a group of former US investigators is now saying that TWA Flight 800 was not brought down by the NTSB's officially determined cause (a gas tank explosion). Now, they're getting more specific. The AP reports they did indeed today file a petition with the NTSB to reopen the probe into the 1996 crash of a Paris-bound jet off the coast of New York City, saying new evidence points to the often-discounted theory that a missile strike may have downed the flight..."

You gotta go geek-deep to get this, but awesome. 

This looks... good?  At least Netflixable.


Possibly Insane Millionaire John McAfee Explains How to Uninstall His - BroBible.com
"Since inventing the world's foremost virus software, millionaire John McAfee moved to a 2.5-acre compound in Belize, began using hardcore psychedelics, surrounded himself with a cabal of bodyguards and prostitutes, was sought in connection for the murder of his American neighbor, and escaped to Guatemala, and later the U.S., with a reporter from Vice. Essentially, he became Colonol Kurtz from Apocalypse Now."


Too funny - Nuking at Sea | dannyfrom504
"...to have some fucking reservist come on board and fuck with our routine (and make extra work for my guys) pissed me off to no end. well one day, cuntessa decided to have have an inservice with all my guys to learn how we educate the crew on STD’s and birth control. everyone was staring at me. i nodded to give my approval to answer and the guys started chiming in with the various forms of birth control. she scrutinized EACH.ONE. so… i order to take the pressure off my guys i said, “early withdrawal”. a few of my guys stiffled a giggle- they knew where this was going. the commander looked at me and informed me that EW is NOT a garaunteed method to prevent pregnancy. i replied- “i’m 32 years old, don’t have any kids and i blast girls on the stomach and back when i’m done.” the laughter could NOT be with-held at this one. my 3 girls hid their faces and my E6 turned around so he could laugh. she then followed with, “well it most certainly won’t prevent HIV, herpes, or genital warts.” i smiled and said, “what am i gonna do get them again?”"

Oh, fuuuuuuuck.  This Is Why You Don’t Climb A Tree To Escape A Bear - BroBible.com:



"When you’re a sexual market loser, the whole world is doing you a favor by tolerating your presence instead of tossing you out on your fat keister to the icy wastelands...

...more fat acceptance. Just what America needs. An excuse to get galactically fat. Despite her sweet-sounding entreaties for acceptaaaaaaance, let there be no mistaking her message for what it is: Vile, ugly lies. The more women who heed her comfort food words, the fewer sexy babes there will be in the world, and the unhappier everyone gets. It affects me personally when women think they can bloat up without consequence. And since I am, as a human male, representative of the way most men think, the resentment at having our shared environment stripped of its most beautiful creations is a universal feeling..."


"These two just feel like two bits of wood."
"It's the context that counts." - George Carlin



CONTEXT:


Third GOP Senator Announces Support for Marriage Equality - APE IN A CAPE
"I know it’s a drop in the bucket. I know there are much larger issues with how Lgbtq people are denied their rights and dignity and safety. But I still find it encouraging. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, has become the third sitting US GOP senator to support marriage equality, and has announced it with a mix of pragmatism and idealism. She said this on twitter, which, to me, is important because it makes it crystal clear how one can be a Conservative and support marriage equality: “Americans should be able to love & marry whom they choose - gay or straight- & government should get out of the way.” Now, to me, this plain statement exposes the weakness of the conservative position that lgbtq marriage is a bad thing. Their own principles should have them saying, “this is not the business of the government, to legislate who can marry.” And here is a bit I found spot-on. Here she’s talking about the basic inequality afforded a lesbian couple that had adopted four kids in her state..."



"Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they’ve tried to hide."



Obesity is not a disease.  Stop stuffing your gob full of crappy food and get to the gym.

"Yesterday I noted a recommendation by a council within the American Medical Association against calling obesity a disease, arguing that doing so undermines prevention efforts and doesn’t really impact treatment. The American Medical Association voted and never mind: They’re calling it a disease."

"Watch then-Senator Joe Biden from 2006 as he directly refutes each point made by his boss, President Obama, about the NSA surveillance program at his news conference last week."
I like this Biden guy.


prostheticknowledge: Anti Facial Recognition... • Richard Kadrey's Damn Tumblr:


Lolo Jones Bitches About Her Paycheck | What Would Tyler Durden Do
"Noted 30-year old virgin and twice Summer Olympics failed Lolo Jones took to the annoying new Vine video feed to bitch about her U.S. Bobsled team paycheck. Apparently, training to be on a Winter Olympics team isn’t a way to get a fat bank account. It really must be tough to learn that spending seven months practicing bobsledding doesn’t earn you the millions like you do being a cop or a plumber or a school teacher. Just wait until Lolo sees how crappy the pay is for taking tennis lessons or being a full-time barfly. Oh, the disappointments in life."

"You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations


"This exchange, from his Buzz Feed obituary, sums up a lot of what he was about:  "'Why do you bother to ask questions you've already decided you know the answers to?' [Hillary Clinton aide Philippe] Reines asked.  'Why don't you give answers that aren't bullshit for a change?' Hastings replied."  When his editor warned him this exchange would make him look like an asshole, Michael responded, "Everyone knows I’m an asshole. The point is that they’re assholes."

...Michael was best known for his Rolling Stone article The Runaway General, which led to the resignation for insubordination of Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal.  The Operators is, among other things, the story behind that story, detailing the angst Michael felt about reporting something so momentous about a group of people he admired and who had treated him seductively well.  He was attacked afterward by numerous "journalists" for whom integrity and courage like Michael's are threatening and incomprehensible.  Nothing makes a sell-out more uncomfortable than to be faced with someone who refuses to be bought."

Veronica Mars Awesomeness.

Politicians = Idiots.
"Grant's question was the last of the night, and his name was undoubtedly a red herring. But the 3D printing issue could have been a chance for the candidates to talk about advanced manufacturing opportunities and economic development, a favorite political issue. It could have even been a chance to talk about guns. Instead, their bewilderment underscored the persistent divide between politicians and the tech community, and illustrated how both sides are missing opportunities as a result of those barriers."

"We've got ink on our hands."

Remember.  "There is no spoon."

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Training.

6/19 - pullups 5x8, chins 3x6/3x5/3x4, pulldowns 10x10, db row 3x10, machine row 10x10, alt db curls 3x8, wrist curls/xt 3x16/10 -- COCT 2x8, 2x6 -- gtg strap ng chins

Truth - RossTraining.com Blog
"In less than 90 seconds, the brief video below will shatter countless excuses related to exercise and fitness. Within the clip, you will see a man work through a brief conditioning circuit. After a few rounds of the circuit, he’s able to achieve a quality, full body workout with minimal equipment. What’s even more impressive is that the man seen within was born in 1941. In summary, here’s a man in his 70s achieving a quality workout with minimal equipment in minimal time. He doesn’t need any special equipment or routines to stay in better condition than the vast majority of adults who are half his age. The take home message is simple. If you want to get in shape, get in shape. Consistency and discipline are far more important than any equipment or facility. Don’t be fooled by the fitness industry’s deception. There are no secrets to fat loss or fitness. You have everything that you’ll ever need to get in shape. You just need to use it."

Today's Internets - "I've gotten increasingly agnostic as I've gotten older, and increasingly wary of ideologies, including my own." - RAW

"RAW: I've gotten increasingly agnostic as I've gotten older, and increasingly wary of ideologies, including my own. So if you tied me to a lie detector, with a gun to my head, I would have to say, most of the time, I'm somewhere on the libertarian-anarchist continuum. But I distrust myself. I distrust being rigidified and getting dogmatic, so I keep challenging my own assumptions and looking at alternatives. Knowing how dumb I am, I don't want to become another dogmatist. I saw what happened to Ayn Rand and sweet Jesus forbid it should happen to me."


"Jeremy Scahill, National Security Correspondent for The Nation, is the author of the best-selling new book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield and the writer, producer and subject of an award-winning documentary of the same name, which goes into wide theatrical release this week. Scahill sat with Reason's Matt Welch for an extended conversation about the book and movie, which thoroughly investigate the way America conducts its covert wars in the post-9/11 world, and how Barack Obama's embrace of drone strikes, rendition, and targeted assassination have cemented the policies of the Bush Administration which declared the entire world "a battlefield."


The author of Go the Fuck to Sleep provides a booklet on jury nullification and how it can help stop the Drug War:
"Author’s note: I confronted Bloomberg once at a Gracie Mansion BBQ, where I asked him to reconcile his administration of record marijuana arrests with his own admission of personal use and enjoyment. He hemmed and hawed. I asked why he wouldn’t arrest himself for the past use, and he said “That’s not how the law works.” I said, “So, really you’re just saying ‘I got away with it.’” At that point he said, “You and I have nothing in common,” and walked away from me. True story. –RC"



"Author Adam Mansbach and illustrator Ricardo Cortes's "children's book for adults," Go The Fuck To Sleep, was a viral sensation. Starting out as a Facebook post, the book blew up online thanks to a pirated PDF that went viral. Soon, Mansbach and Cortes had found a publishing partner, had an audiobook voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, and found their hilarious creation atop Amazon.com's best-sellers list. Now the illustrator of Go The Fuck To Sleep hopes to put a different subject to rest: the war on drugs. Yesterday Cortes released Jury Independence Illustrated, a roughly 20-page booklet delving into the problems of skyrocketing non-violent drug convictions."

Free booklet here - Jury Independence Illustrated


"Juries do not only decide guilt or innocence; they can also serve as checks on unjust laws. Judges will not tell you about your right to nullify—to vote not guilty regardless of whether the prosecution has proven its case if you believe the law at issue is unjust. They may tell you that you may only judge the facts of the case put to you and not the law. They may strike you from a jury if you do not agree under oath to do so, but the right to nullify exists. There is reason to be concerned about this power: nobody wants courtroom anarchy. But there is also reason to wield it, especially today: if you believe that nonviolent drug offenders should not go to prison, vote not guilty. The creators of the television show "The Wire" vowed to do that a few years back ("we will...no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war," wrote Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon). And the illustrator of the children's book that has every author banging his head against his desk and every parent cackling just wrote a sweet if somewhat simple guide to nullification."


"There is an argument that posits that all human beings are is vessels made of information (DNA) and naturally selected for the storage and replication of information. Everything we say, do, wear or make is a form of information, a meme, to be copied by others with variation and selection. Information is king and we are but subjects. That being the case then the handing over of the replication and transmission role to computers could, in a dystopian fantasy such as the one I was dreaming up for a radio play, result in the rapid obsolescence of human beings. Computers process, copy, select and transmit more information than we can and they do it faster. Increasingly, we help them along by buying into the reduction of information; by retweeting and reposting pieces about "scroungers" and "fundamentalists" and "corrupt politicians" and by accepting the boundaries defined by these reductions as the ones within which we’ll frame our arguments ("Are the unemployed scroungers or not?" rather than "Is it useful to make a judgement on any human being purely on the basis of his or her employment status?")."


"Here in Thailand generally nobody knows what the speed limit is, and I have never seen a radar gun in over a decade. I know they do exist in some places, but apparently not in Chiang Mai, where I live. I have also hardly ever seen a speed limit posted. Consequently I don’t know what the speed limits are either. If you do get stopped by a cop for some infraction, you can actually talk to them. If the cop is male, and you are an attractive woman, you can tell them you were in a rush to visit your dying mother in the hospital, and chances are he will just let you go. Or you can tell the cop you are in a real hurry and ask if you can pay the fine right on the spot. Often the cop will  greatly discount the fine based on your cock and bull story how poor you are, and then he will slip the money into his pocket where it will safely stay to support his meager salary. Some people call this corruption. Others call it a convenient arrangement which benefits both parties."


"Because that’s the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars. I can’t imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would’ve been if they’d stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn’t through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think."














"(954): He gave me twenty cool ranch tacos and declared, drunk, "Look, I do good""



"(615): I have good news and bad news. Bad news, she's not in porn. Good news, I found porn."



"In an interview with Charlie Rose that aired last night, President Obama said that despite his defense of the NSA's recently revealed surveillance programs, he continues to believe "we don't have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security," which he called "a false choice." Still, he said, "that doesn't mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program or any given action that we take." The first example he gave was telling:

 "All of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports....When we were growing up, that wasn't the case, right? You ran up to the gate five minutes [before your flight]. It's been a while since I went through commercial flying, but I gather the experience is not the same. That's a tradeoff we make.... To say there's a tradeoff doesn't mean somehow that we've abandoned freedom. I don't think anyone says we're no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports."

I don't know about you, but I never made a decision to "go through a whole bunch of security at airports." I do not arrive early, wait in line, repeatedly display my government-issued ID, empty my pockets, take my computer out, cram my toiletries into a Ziploc bag, remove my shoes and belt, and stand with my arms held up in a gesture of surrender while a scanner looks under my clothing becase I like doing those things, or even because I see them as a reasonable price to pay for the extra protection these rituals of obeisance allegedly provide. I do these things because the government makes me do them. I would welcome the option of flying without all the security theater, despite the extra risk that supposedly would entail, and I suspect I am not alone. Maybe if Obama flew commercial once in a while he would understand that travelers do not necessarily comply with the TSA's arbitrary edicts because they view them as sensible precautions well worth the inconvenience and humiliation.

While I would not say "we're no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports," we certainly are less free than we were before. Otherwise it would make no sense to describe this change as a "tradeoff." The government took some of our freedom, and in return it gave us the illusion of security. Many of us doubt the value of this deal. Are we not allowed to complain about a loss of freedom as long as we have some left? Is that what Obama has in mind when he says "we don't have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security"?

...But at least in both of these cases, there was a public debate that weighed the cost in privacy against the benefit in safety. People could lobby Congress to change the rules governing airport security procedures, and they could lobby their state legislators to restrict or ban the use of DUI checkpoints, because—and this point is crucial—they knew these policies existed. That was not true of the NSA's massive phone-record database or its online surveillance until a couple of weeks ago, and the details of how these programs work remain sketchy. Hence this exchange between Charlie Rose and the president: Rose: Should this be transparent in some way? Obama: It is transparent. That's why we set up the FISA court. That would be the secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the decisions of which are shielded from public view..."




"Russell Brand was invited on Morning Joe today to discuss his new stand-up comedy tour Messiah Complex, but the interview quickly went off the rails. And it wasn't Brand's fault..."