8/20 - mobility, squats, bench, db row, incline bench, situps, pushups, bw squats
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
"In all likelihood, Donald Trump will pick our next president..."
Political Reporters Cover a Business Candidate | Scott Adams Blog: "If he runs as a Republican, he will be picking himself, and winning, assuming he keeps going this way. If he runs as an independent he will be picking Clinton as president. There’s your republic: One guy gets to vote for President this year."
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
"Students are learning that they are as helpless and easily hurt... This, of course, is not helping them at all—not in terms of their education, and not in terms of their psychological health."
How Helicoptered Kids Become Hypersensitive College Students - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "...schools are embracing “trigger warnings,” which are placed at the top of readings that might trigger flashbacks to some unpleasant episode in a student’s life. Some Harvard University law students, for instance, balk at the idea that they would have to learn about rape law—hearing about that crime might re-traumatize anyone who had lived through it.
The article also discusses “microaggressions”—remarks made, even innocently, that are received as blows by the person being addressed. For instance, asking Asian or Hispanic students where they were born could come across as a hint that the speaker does not consider the other student totally American. That’s the “aggression.”
...Why are college students being treated as so supremely fragile that they can’t read a disturbing book, and must be constantly on the lookout for any remarks or attitudes that could somehow be labeled aggressive? Because that’s how we have been taught to raise our children these past 20 or 30 years: thin-skinned, super-sensitive, and primed to turn to the authorities—parents, teachers, and now deans—any time they feel the slightest bit uncomfortable or aggrieved. After all, this is the generation we raised with “baby knee pads” to make crawling less painful, and helmets to protect them while toddling. Somehow, we became utterly convinced that our kids bruise so easily and permanently that special precautions must be taken—precautions that were never necessary until this moment in history. That message grew up into trigger warnings: Watch out, kids! You are too easily hurt.
This is also the generation that grew up getting trophies for 8th place. My son got one, on a league with nine teams. With that trophy came the same message: Kids, you are too fragile to handle the micro-misery of losing. And this is also the generation of students who grew up surrounded by posters at school exhorting them to be on the lookout for bullying. When bullying is the thing you look for, bullying is what you see. What starts as hyper-alertness to bullying in third grade ends as hyper-sensitivity to microaggressions on college campuses...
Students are learning that they are as helpless and easily hurt as infants. This, of course, is not helping them at all—not in terms of their education, and not in terms of their psychological health. The authors quote a survey of the American College Health Association that found 54 percent of college students surveyed said they had felt “overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent just five years before. Naturally, you are going to feel anxious if you’ve been told from infancy that basic locomotion is dangerous, losing is unendurable, classmates are out to get you, and you are not equipped to stand up for yourself."
“Romance is completely dead, and it’s the girls’ fault...”
You know why guys 'hit it and quit it", are cads and emotionally unavailable bad boys? Because it works. Enough women respond so as to make it an evolutionarily viable mating strategy. If it didn't work, they wouldn't do it. Bottom line. Tinder and Hookup-Culture Promotion | Vanity Fair: "...the Dating Apocalypse,” says a woman in New York, aged 29.
As the polar ice caps melt and the earth churns through the Sixth Extinction, another unprecedented phenomenon is taking place, in the realm of sex. Hookup culture, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship. “We are in uncharted territory” when it comes to Tinder et al., says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. “There have been two major transitions” in heterosexual mating “in the last four million years,” he says. “The first was around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled,” leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract. “And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet.”
People used to meet their partners through proximity, through family and friends, but now Internet meeting is surpassing every other form. “It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.” As soon as people could go online they were using it as a way to find partners to date and have sex with. In the 90s it was Craigslist and AOL chat rooms, then Match.com and Kiss.com. But the lengthy, heartfelt e-mails exchanged by the main characters in You’ve Got Mail (1998) seem positively Victorian in comparison to the messages sent on the average dating app today. “I’ll get a text that says, ‘Wanna fuck?’ ” says Jennifer, 22, a senior at Indiana University Southeast, in New Albany. “They’ll tell you, ‘Come over and sit on my face,’ ” says her friend, Ashley, 19...
On a steamy night at Satsko, everyone is Tindering. Or OkCupiding, or Happning, or Hinging. The tables are filled with young women and men drinking sake and beer and intermittently checking their phones and swiping. “Agh, look at this,” says Kelly, 26, who’s sitting at a table with friends, holding up a message she received from a guy on OkCupid. “I want to have you on all fours,” it says, going on to propose a graphic sexual scene. “I’ve never met this person,” says Kelly. At a table in the front, six young women have met up for an after-work drink. They’re seniors from Boston College, all in New York for summer internships, ranging from work in a medical-research lab to a luxury department store. They’re attractive and fashionable, with bright eyes highlighted with dark eyeliner wings. None of them are in relationships, they say. I ask them how they’re finding New York dating. “New York guys, from our experience, they’re not really looking for girlfriends,” says the blonde named Reese. “They’re just looking for hit-it-and-quit-it on Tinder.” “People send really creepy shit on it,” says Jane, the serious one. “They start out with ‘Send me nudes,’ ” says Reese. “Or they say something like ‘I’m looking for something quick within the next 10 or 20 minutes—are you available?’ ‘O.K., you’re a mile away, tell me your location.’ It’s straight efficiency.”
“I hooked up with three girls, thanks to the Internet, off of Tinder, in the course of four nights, and I spent a total of $80 on all three girls,” Nick relays proudly. He goes on to describe each date, one of which he says began with the young woman asking him on Tinder to “ ‘come over and smoke [weed] and watch a movie.’ I know what that means,” he says, grinning. “We talk for a total of maybe 10 to 15 minutes,” he says. “We hook up. Afterwards she goes, ‘Oh my God, I swear I wasn’t gonna have sex with you.’ And I was like, Well, you did a pretty shitty job of that one.” “They all say that,” the guys say...
Bring all of this up to young men, however, and they scoff. Women are just as responsible for “the shit show that dating has become,” according to one. “Romance is completely dead, and it’s the girls’ fault,” says Alex, 25, a New Yorker who works in the film industry. “They act like all they want is to have sex with you and then they yell at you for not wanting to have a relationship. How are you gonna feel romantic about a girl like that? Oh, and by the way? I met you on Tinder.” “Women do exactly the same things guys do,” said Matt, 26, who works in a New York art gallery. “I’ve had girls sleep with me off OkCupid and then just ghost me”—that is, disappear, in a digital sense, not returning texts. “They play the game the exact same way. They have a bunch of people going at the same time—they’re fielding their options. They’re always looking for somebody better, who has a better job or more money.” A few young women admitted to me that they use dating apps as a way to get free meals. “I call it Tinder food stamps,” one said.
Even the emphasis on looks inherent in a dating game based on swiping on photos is something men complain women are just as guilty of buying into. “They say in their profiles, ‘No shirtless pictures,’ but that’s bullshit,” says Nick, the same as above. “The day I switched to a shirtless picture with my tattoos, immediately, within a few minutes, I had, like, 15 matches.”
"And if women aren’t interested in being treated as sexual objects, why do they self-objectify in their profile pictures? some men ask. “There’s a lot of girls who are just like, Check me out, I’m hot, I’m wearing a bikini,” says Jason, the Brooklyn photographer, who on his OkCupid profile calls himself a “feminist.” “I don’t know if it’s my place to tell a girl she shouldn’t be flaunting her sexuality if that’s what she wants to do. But...”
Men talk about the nudes they receive from women. They show off the nudes. “Tit pics and booty pics,” said Austin, 22, a college student in Indiana. “My phone is full of ‘em.” And what about unsolicited dick pics? “They want to see your dick,” insists Adam, 23, a male model in New York. “They get excited from it. They’re like, ‘Oh my God, you’re huge.’ ” No woman I talked to said she had ever asked for one. And yet, “If you’re a girl who’s trying to date, it’s normal to get dick pics all the time,” said Olivia, 24, a Brandeis graduate. “It’s like we have dicks flying at us.”"
"As a collective, women have told men that not talking about feelings as much as they do makes them inadequate. For the record, a glut of feelings without resolution is meaningless."
Men Have Emotions, But Women Don’t Listen: "Men aren’t good at expressing emotions.” “Men only talk about sports.” “Men need to be more sensitive.” “Men are all jerks.” We’ve all heard these platitudes...
Men have emotions. Women need only adjust how they listen. Men express plenty of feelings; they just do it differently than women and there’s nothing wrong with that.
You know how Eskimos supposedly have 4 dozen words for snow? It’s the same thing for women and feelings. They have over 4 dozen ways to describe happy, angry, sad–4 dozen reasons why they’re mad at their co-worker today.
When a woman says, “men need to be more sensitive and in touch with their emotions,” I hear, “men need to be more like women.” Bad idea. If women want to be with men who can talk about their feelings and daily minutia just like their best girlfriend, then why don’t they just get together with their girlfriend?
...Men are more solution-focused while women are process-focused... It’s not a matter of women being more verbal; generally speaking, we’re equally verbal. Here’s the difference: women use words to process their feelings, often wallowing in emotions without reaching resolution. Men state their feelings and use words to achieve resolution. As a collective, women have told men that not talking about feelings as much as they do makes them inadequate. For the record, a glut of feelings without resolution is meaningless. Society doesn’t tell women, “Hey, instead of blathering about your feelings and problems all day, why don’t you get off your ass and do something about them.” I don’t walk around saying, “I don’t know how to fix my car,” like I’m an abnormal defective. Yet, I’ve heard countless men parrot, “I’m not good at talking about my feelings” in a tone that sounds like they’ve been beaten into submission. Women say this to the men they supposedly love without batting an eyelash and men just swallow it. Can you imagine the female outrage if men did the same thing to women by saying, “You’re not good at being rational.”
...Thirty years ago, Psychology became “feminized.” Women entered the field in droves in the late 1970s. Now, women greatly outnumber male mental health professionals... Thus began the “men need to be more sensitive and get in touch with their feelings” re-education movement. Female mental health “experts” surfaced in the proliferation of daytime talk shows and male characters cried openly on television shows like 30something to get in touch with their “sensitive side.”
In this confluence of events, men tried to become the sensitive guy modern women claimed to want, but did they? In reality, most women don’t want men who cry when they watch “Beaches.” In fact, most women don’t want to be with men who would willingly watch Beaches or a Lifetime network movie. They don’t want men to be unfeeling robots, but want them to be men–strong and reliable, yet capable of tenderness. The result? American men, once stalwart bull mastiffs, turned into angry confused Pekingese drowning in a sea of mixed signals unleashed by women."
"Science."
A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform - NYTimes.com: "In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers.
It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.”
The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim of Dr. Mori’s misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog Retraction Watch.
“Nobody had noticed the whole thing was rotten,” said Dr. Fang, who is a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended. To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it...
Dr. Casadevall, now editor in chief of the journal mBio, said he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct. “This is a tremendous threat,” he said...
No one claims that science was ever free of misconduct or bad research. Indeed, the scientific method itself is intended to overcome mistakes and misdeeds. When scientists make a new discovery, others review the research skeptically before it is published. And once it is, the scientific community can try to replicate the results to see if they hold up. But critics like Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall argue that science has changed in some worrying ways in recent decades — especially biomedical research, which consumes a larger and larger share of government science spending.
In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent. In 2010 The Journal of Medical Ethics published a study finding the new raft of recent retractions was a mix of misconduct and honest scientific mistakes...
To survive professionally, scientists feel the need to publish as many papers as possible, and to get them into high-profile journals. And sometimes they cut corners or even commit misconduct to get there. To measure this claim, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall looked at the rate of retractions in 17 journals from 2001 to 2010 and compared it with the journals’ “impact factor,” a score based on how often their papers are cited by scientists. The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate."
"If I I'm gonna find a way to set up a situation where I'm always the injured party and I prove again and again that I'm persecuted... then I 'm never gonna get fucking healed."
Barry Crimmins: "Goldthwait’s new documentary, “Call Me Lucky,” captures Crimmins’ life and career, in which he supplemented his stand-up act with activism, including opposition to Reagan administration’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua. The heart of the project, though, is Crimmins’ decision to go public in the early ’90s with the fact that he had been raped as a 4-year-old child by the male friend of his babysitter’s mother. He grappled with the memory of this childhood trauma by exposing pedophilia chatrooms popping up on then-emerging Internet provider America Online. When called to testify before a congressional hearing in 1995, he challenged AOL’s reticence to shut such chatrooms down."
"Even though I got raped when I was four years old... If I I'm gonna find a way to set up a situation where I'm always the injured party and I prove again and again that I'm persecuted... then I 'm never gonna get fucking healed.
'If anybody can defuse the term word trigger warning then youre the goddamned guy... we're gonna develop a nation of permanent children. This fucking term is disgusting...'
It does damage It just sets people up to stay in the pit. To wallow. Its "empowering" them people to wallow."
"...desires for emotional protection from ideas that might offend them— trigger warnings, microaggressions, and the like—mimic certain cognitive disorders."
How Trigger Warnings Make College Students Helpless, Humorless, and Stupid - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A similarly excellent, just-published companion article written by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education President Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the trends that have normalized such a repressive intellectual environment for campus comedy. Students’ desires for emotional protection from ideas that might offend them—institutionalized as trigger warnings, microaggressions, and the like—mimic certain cognitive disorders, Lukianoff and Haidt claim. Vindictive protectiveness—their name for the new regime of speech-curtailing measures on campuses—leaves students unprepared for the real world and may actually worsen their social anxieties...
...vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically. Vindictive protectiveness hurts all students by depriving them of the considerable intellectual benefits of a campus that tolerates controversial speakers—from offensive comedians like Chris Rock to political extremists like Bill Ayers. It also hurts the faculty, who increasingly feel compelled to self-censor if they want to keep their jobs. But ultimately, vindictive protectiveness even harms the very people it is intended to protect—emotionally-fragile students—by teaching them unhealthy avoidance tactics."
Monday, August 17, 2015
Training.
8/17 - mobility, press/push press, deadlifts [PR 405, mixed grip/chalk/belt], chins, dips, db shrugs, pushups, bw squats
From Surviving to Thriving: Power Couple Becomes Primal Team | Mark's Daily Apple: "Today, Pat and I are totally different people, inside and out. While Pat’s weight hasn’t changed much, his overall body composition has. He has lost body fat and gained muscle mass, and there is a noticeable change in the way he looks. He’s buff! Pat is active five days a week, either running, swimming, cycling, or lifting weights. This is all done AFTER a hard day’s work. He has competed in many triathlons, often dominating on the bike section. He ran his first marathon in September 2014. He enjoys playing in the North Sea on his surfboard, or my paddleboard. More importantly, however, his emotional issues are gone, and he is happy all the time. Pat no longer deals with any gastrointestinal issues because we no longer eat the foods that hurt his guts. I know Pat has changed for the better, through his own doing, because he told me a few weeks ago “I don’t want winter to end!” – a far cry from where he used to be two years ago."
From Surviving to Thriving: Power Couple Becomes Primal Team | Mark's Daily Apple: "As for me, I’ve lost 11 kg altogether. My body fat percentage went from 34% to 23%. Before my low-carb journey began, I had the metabolism of a 49 year old; now I’ve got the metabolism of a 23 year old, twelve years younger than my chronological age of 35! My fitness has improved significantly, and I’ve broken every personal best I have in running by minutes, aside from the half marathon (because I just haven’t run a half marathon for a while). I’ve built muscle and can do pistol squats and push ups – When I started PBF, I couldn’t do a single normal push up! I even celebrated my 35th birthday this year with 35 push ups, resting in plank when needed. I also just feel better and like I have limitless energy. My cravings have disappeared, and my mental capacity has increased. I teach teenagers with severe emotional and/or behavioural needs, and I feel my ability to handle the stresses of this job has improved as well. Finally, my eczema has disappeared."
