Saturday, November 22, 2014

Training - "The work you put in is never lost."

11/23 - Sunday PT/travel later this week - press, chins, dips, curls, run stairs




6 kids/No Excuses/Awesome.  THIS WOMAN'S INCREDIBLE PHYSIQUE MAKES IT HARD TO BELIEVE SHE'S HAD 6 CHILDREN! - DoYouEven: Gym Wear, Apparel and Accessories: "Deborah Goodman a 33 year old mother of 6 children has no excuses in her vocabulary. This mother of 6 looks like a 20 year old fitness model and is now competing in fitness competions just a few years after she had her last baby. This is defnitely the best physique you will ever see of a mother that has 6 children."


Thursday, November 20, 2014

Training - Leg Day.

11/21 - squats, side bends, treadmill, steam room, stretch


Reminder to Self:  Lift Big Eat Big: "The correlation between people who cannot take rest days and people who consistently don't make progress is so strong, I am just going to assume it is a causation at this point."




"A disfigured lizard of monopolized violence."



Ensuring international financial support remains the #1 priority of the Liberian government.  So dysfunctional.  UPDATE 1-Liberia has upper hand over Ebola but support must continue-president | Reuters: "Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said on Wednesday that her government has the upper hand in the fight against Ebola, but warned against complacency or any reduction in international support...

The sustaining of anti-Ebola measures over the last two months has meant that in Liberia we now have the upper hand," Sirleaf said in a statement. "But our government remains concerned that progress in this battle will lead to complacency on the part of the international community," she added."

  

"You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and took their land. That's what conquering nations do. That's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, 'I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it.' The history of the world isn't people making friends. You had better weapons and you massacred them. End of story." - Spike, BTVS

 Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion by Mark Ames: "The idea that spree shooters aren’t simply deranged wackos is a little more acceptable now today than when Going Postal was originally published back in 2005, but it’s still largely anathema to both sides of the political spectrum. The left wants to pretend that banning guns will somehow solve the problem; never mind that as Ames demonstrates, workplace and school shootings were essentially nonexistent before the 1980’s. The right thinks that violent video games and death metal are driving kids to ventilate their own classmates, as if teenagers are brain-dead automatons who can be turned into murderers with the flip of a switch...

Ames’ thesis in Going Postal is that workplace and school shootings are a modern form of slave revolts, every spree killer a Nat Turner for the Information Age. That mere sentence is enough to generate a kneejerk reaction from even the most limp-wristed peacenik liberal: “America’s standard of living is the greatest in human history! You work a cushy office job, live in an apartment with central AC and can afford to spend your free time jacking off and playing video games! Your ancestors had to shovel shit for fourteen hours a day just to put food on the table, so quit bitching, you pussy!”

...Ames contends that the reason why the U.S. had so few slave revolts compared to other countries in Latin America or the Caribbean is because American slave owners developed foolproof psychological techniques for making their slaves docile and obedient. Their methods of psychological control are virtually identical to the ways that modern corporations condition their workers, including making slaves believe that their masters’ interests are the same as their own...

But if spree shootings are the same thing as slave revolts, why the sudden uptick in the past three decades? The answer: Ronald Reagan. When Reagan became president in 1981, his administration transformed the American workplace—and to a lesser extent, public schools—into a cutthroat competition, where workers are forced to work longer hours for less pay, all to make the rich richer. He crushed unions (literally in the case of PATCO), supported outsourcing and downsizing, and encouraged corporations and employers to slash their workers’ pay and benefits. And as it turns out, there was absolutely no rational basis for this, as the conservative/libertarian claim that the economy was ailing under Jimmy Carter was a complete and utter lie.

…The truth of the matter is that on a macroeconomic level, the difference between the Carter era and the Reagan era was minimal. For instance, economic growth during the Carter administration averaged 2.8 percent annually, while under Reagan, from 1982 to 1989, growth average 3.2 percent. Was it really worth killing ourselves over that extra .4 percent of growth? For a lucky few, yes. On the other key economic gauge, unemployment, the Carter years were actually better than Reagan’s, averaging 6.7 percent annually during his “malaise-stricken” term as compared to an average 7.3 percent unemployment rate during the glorious eight-year reign of Ronald Reagan. Under Carter, people worked less, got far more benefits, had greater job security, and the country grew almost the same annual average rate as under Reagan. On the other hand, according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1996, under Reagan life got worse for those who had it worse: the number of people below the poverty level increased in almost every year from 1981 (31.8 million) to 1992 (39.3 million). As it turns out, the only people who were suffering during Carter’s presidency were the rich.

The indignity of only being able to afford two summer homes instead of three was too much for them to bear, so they pushed for the election of a president who would let them rape and loot as much as they wanted. And we’re living in the world they created, a world in which 90 percent of college grads are forced to move back home, where health insurance is increasingly impossible to obtain, and where sociopaths like Donald Trump and Jack Welch are regarded as folk heroes for humiliating their employees and firing them in mass layoffs. The spree shooters are the people who’ve decided that they’re not going to take it anymore. Workplace shootings began among Postal Service employees (hence the phrase “going postal”) because the USPS was the first victim of Reagan-style slash-and-burn economics. Under Richard Nixon, the Postal Service was forced to become profitable (a requirement never imposed on any other government agency), which resulted in a series of employee benefit cuts and a new crop of sociopathic managers seizing control. Post office shootings were blithely dismissed by the public until 1989, when Louisville, Kentucky-based Standard Gravure employee Joseph Wesbecker became the poster boy for workplace rage..."




This is, in fact, false advertising.  Far from "Super" and much more "Oh god, oh god, this place is horrible."  Two notes, 1 - not my pic, but it's weird what you come across in random internets places & 2 - the places you'll go into to appease visitors in Thailand, I swear.

Pretty adorable. Bane Grimm:

Training - "Nothing but the sound of my breath and the beat of my heart. And in that moment, I feel free."

11/20 - bench, chins, pushups, treadmill, seated row, curls, steam, stretch



Timeline Photos - Melissa Sarah Wee: "Having a bad couple of days but not letting it get me down. I shut everything out and just focus on the iron. 

When I'm pounding those weights, there's nothing else on my mind. I hear nothing. Nothing but the sound of my breath and the beat of my heart. And in that moment, I feel free. 

Free of worries, free of bullshit. Nothing else matters. I'm just there to be free."




  


#TheStruggleIsReal


Wednesday, November 19, 2014

"The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly..."

"...It is simply indifferent." - J. H. Holmes


Forever ReBlog.


My hate grows stronger.

The Drunken Interview: Seven Questions for Daniele Bolelli | FIGHTLAND: "When his master presented him with a certificate of enlightenment—which was both a great honor and the necessary document to begin climbing the Zen hierarchy—Ikkyu promptly decided to wave goodbye to a monastic career and burned it. The so-called professionals of Zen were in Ikkyu’s eyes a bunch of posers—too busy acting ‘spiritual’ to be able to really taste spirituality in its rawest forms. Some people believed Zen enlightenment could only be found among clouds of incense in silent meditation. Ikkyu, on the other hand, found sake-drinking and wild sex more to his liking. As he put in his poems, “The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation.” Or, even more bluntly, “Don’t hesitate: get laid—that’s wisdom. Sitting around chanting sutras: that’s crap.” Ikkyu denied the separation between sacred and profane, and firmly believed that Zen was a matter of awareness that could be practiced in any environment. He ended up attracting plenty of friends who followed him in his adventures, and had a particularly powerful impact on several Japanese art forms (from tea ceremony to calligraphy, etc.) The stories about him are both enlightening and hilarious."


To be truly evil you need bureaucracy.  Why Is California Fighting the Release of Non-Violent Inmates? Cheap Labor. - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "The Los Angeles Times reported the order, along with this rather interesting explainer of why the state was resisting letting prisoners out early: Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool. Prisoners' lawyers countered that the corrections department could hire public employees to do the work. So, yeah, that's a pretty horrifying argument for keeping people in overcrowded prisons. "


Rejected for Being Asian: Students Sue Harvard, UNC Over Race-Based Admissions - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Harvard has managed to keep its Asian student population constant over the years, while universities that don't consider race as an admission factor have seen more and more Asians gain admittance. According to Inside Higher Ed: What Harvard calls a holistic approach to admissions (in which applicants are reviewed individually, with a range of criteria considered) is actually a disguise for racial balancing in a system where Asian Americans are held to higher standards for admission, according to the lawsuit. As evidence, the lawsuit says that the racial demographics of Harvard’s admitted class, first-year enrollment and total student body have remained stable over the last several years. ... "In light of Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies, [Asian Americans] are competing only against each other, and all other racial and ethnic groups are insulated from competing against high-achieving Asian Americans,” the lawsuit reads...

Who can defend abject racial discrimination against Asians? Harvard's administrators and some of its faculty can. One professor even had the gall to suggest that discriminating against Asians is good for Asians. According to Fox News: “Asian-American students benefit greatly from attending the racially and socio-economically diverse campuses that affirmative action helps create,” Julie Park, assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland and author of the book “When Diversity Drops,” told FoxNews.com."

  Parts Unknown Jamaica: Just the One-Liners - Eater: "James Bond doesn't get this. James Bond's a hustler. He gets this for a couple days before he moves on to the next location. The guy who lives here is the Bond villain." 
"Ian Fleming was much closer to Blofeld or Hugo Drax. Those guys had lots of leisure time, sitting around in hammocks trying to figure out how to take over the fucking world. Lot of downtime in world domination. Bond was a working-class fucker.""



WTF.  Citing Deference to ‘Broad’ Government Power, Judge Says Atlantic City May Bulldoze Home to Benefit Casino - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "According to the New Jersey Constitution, state officials may only condemn private property for redevelopment purposes when that property is "blighted." Yet in a ruling issued on Monday, Judge Julio L. Mendez of the New Jersey Superior Court allowed Atlantic City to seize one man's non-blighted family home. Why? Because the state enjoys "broad" powers, the judge said, and the courts have no business standing in the way."


Can't stop the signal.  5 Reasons why I am pro file-sharing and copyright reform — LEXI ALEXANDER: "It has been proven over and over again that file-sharers spend more money on music, movies & games than non file-sharers. Current studies have it at 30% more. What do we achieve by consistently sending out the message that we despise the behavior of our best customers?

...Let's look at Popcorn Time for a second. The other day I spent an evening with a group of young filmmakers and come to find out, every single one of them uses Popcorn Time even though they all pay for legal cable and streaming services. We all broke out in an animated discussion about how easy and convenient Popcorn Time is versus the variety of legal streaming devices on the current market.  Now if you're the CEO of an on-demand media provider, wouldn't you be curious to know who the guys are that created a better video streaming tool than the engineers on your payroll? And wouldn't it make more sense to offer them a job for millions of dollars,  rather than pay a bunch of lawyers those same millions to put them out of commission? But you know how the story of Napster ended. The genius kid was shut down (not only his website but as the documentary aptly portrayed...his soul as well) and a couple of years later Apple has 5.2 billion in iTunes sales. There's something sinister at play here. I had this discussion with an Executive the other day (who coincidentally also enjoys Popcorn Time secretly) and I asked him: "Why can't this industry embrace these guys?" And he said: "Because fear always pushes back.""

#RightInTheFeels 

This is why people don't like cops.  Brickbat: Honor the Vets - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A Victoria, Canada, police officer pulled Debbie Ferguson out of a funeral procession to give her a $230 ticket for having an obscured license plate. Ferguson was part of the funeral procession for Steven Allen, a Canadian Army soldier killed during training. The procession took place on Remembrance Day." 


A Week of Praise: Womanly Love: "I can take care of myself just fine, but I still want a girl to do nice things for me because unconditional self-sacrifice is one of the foundational principles of a relationship. If you truly love someone, you should be prepared to do things for them that you wouldn’t do for anyone else, even at great personal expense to yourself. That’s the very essence of love; wanting to please your [them] just because. "




Tuesday, November 18, 2014

"When something is detestable, and yet inevitable, what one must do..."

"...is not merely to endure it - a hard task whatever one may do - but find an excuse for loving it.  Everything is a matter of points of view, and misfortune is often only the sign of a false interpretation of life." -  Henry de Montherlant.  Of course, he killed himself, so there's that.

  


 This kid, I swear.  Too awesome.

"One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it's expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility." - Eleanor Roosevelt



#killmenow 







I don't care, these never get old.