"I could do this all day." #TeamCap

"...you don't give up."

GOD. DAMN.  

Training - "We will all die. We will all be in a lot of pain. It's all coming our way..."

3/10 - stretch, power clean, deadlifts, squats, situps, speed bag

3/9 - yoga, stretch, foam roll

3/8 - roadwork, shadowbox, stretch, grip work

"Well, guess what my friend?  We will all die.  We will all be in a lot of pain.  It's all coming our way.  It's inevitable.  It's part of life.  But in the meantime you might as well be a fucking savage and live your life the way you want to live.  And you might as well put your best effort and your best foot forward and train like a motherfucker." - Mark Bell

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"Learning to separate “happiness” from “spending money” is the quickest and most reliable way to a better life."

If You Think This is About Extreme Frugality, You’re Missing The Point: "So I explained to the man in the interview that if we wanted to go to Disneyland, we would go to Disneyland. Hell, we would live inside the park or perhaps one of the Disney-owned cruise ships if we saw fit. 

We just happen to find that tourist traps like Disney are a pretty pale and distant second place compared to the fine places that Mother Nature has built for us. We don’t use our bikes for transportation and hauling instead of our cars, even in the dark and even in the middle of winter because it saves us a few dollars of fuel. We do it because it’s an awesome way to connect with your own town, stay in proper condition, adapt naturally to your own climate, and live like a real human instead of a sanitized, flabby car clown. I don’t swim and and paddle kayaks and canoes all summer because I lack the funds to buy a twin-engine motorboat. I do it because when it comes to recreational pastimes, muscle wins over motor every fucking time...

Learning to separate “happiness” from  “spending money” is the quickest and most reliable way to a better life. The side-effect of this is that your life will become much less expensive and you will therefore become much wealthier very quickly. But it’s not about the money, and as long as you think it is about the money, you’re still fucked."

Frequently Complained Questions: "...more importantly, the sooner you let go of the belief that these things you want really bring you more happiness, the happier and richer you will be."

"I also note that there has been no change to Barbie’s male equivalent, Ken. It seems he’ll remain a bronzed God..."

Why I Fully Support Plus-Size Barbie - Breitbart: "When I announced I was going to be writing on plus-size Barbie dolls, you no doubt expected me to be wholly in condemnation of the concept. After all, isn’t this just another capitulation to the miserable, loveless “fat activism” set? 

You no doubt expected that I’d stand with parents outraged that adult political hang-ups are being forced on their kids. Or focus groups of young girls who unwrapped “Curvy Barbie” only to laugh hysterically and talk about how fat she was. Surely, you’ll have been thinking to yourselves, Milo Yiannopoulos of all people would agree that Curvy Barbie is a blight on our toy shelves — an ugly stubbly beast that will grow up living in Skipper’s spare room running an Etsy store. 

But you’d be wrong! 

Mattel may have foisted Curvy Barbie on us at the behest of feminists, but good things can sometimes happen for bad reasons. Firstly, let’s get the obvious out of the way: I’m gay. The more young girls are encouraged to become fat and unattractive, the better life gets for me. Every step fat-feminism takes towards victory means another wistful glance in my direction from otherwise-straight men. 

I also note that there has been no change to Barbie’s male equivalent, Ken. It seems he’ll remain a bronzed God, a veritable Michelangelo’s David of the toy aisle. That’s also good for me, because it means well meaning parents will continue to encourage their sons to get to the weight room early. By the time they turn 21, they’ll be just right for me I mean they’ll be well-adjusted, healthy adults who won’t place a burden on western healthcare systems. 

The combination of perfect bod Ken with Cellulite Thighs Barbie will also make women complacent. It’ll trick them into thinking that they can let themselves go and still get the perfect guy. Sorry ladies, but I don’t see Brad Pitt marrying Lena Dunham any day soon...

While I support the traditional, skinny Barbie’s role as an aspirational beauty ideal, she only really provides a target to aim for...

Another reason to welcome Frumpy Barbie is that she isn’t nearly as obese as the fat activists would like. Campaigners are already arguing that she isn’t fat enough...

The reaction will teach Mattel a lesson: give fat activists an inch, and they’ll take a mile with an extra portion of fries and a Big Gulp on the side."

"Invest your time in furthering your own education, health, and meaningful relationships..."

Why We are Not Really All Doomed: "Yes, that’s all there is to it. It is bold, cheesy, simplistic and contains some profanity just to let you know I really mean it. Yet it is oddly similar to the wisdom Warren Buffett just repeated in this year’s annual letter to shareholders. In that classic, he compares market crashes and financial crises to a mouthy neighbor shouting his estimate of your farm’s value over the fence at you, while you are busy producing food from the land and the sunshine. Humankind’s ability to live well and prosper depends at its core only on productive land, sunshine and our collective knowledge. While the first item on the list is currently under some attack, the second comes with a billion-year guarantee and the third is increasing so rapidly that it should easily be able to correct our current failures in the land department. In fact, this whole website is one tiny contribution towards that correction – a chunk of human knowledge that grows over time and helps to solve an existing problem...

In less fluffy and metaphorical terms, this means: Invest your money in index funds and real estate rather than “protecting” it while trying to predict the next collapse. You’ll still own your piece of land or your slice of thousands of businesses regardless of what the guy on the fence is yelling about what he would pay for it at the moment. Invest your time in furthering your own education, health, and meaningful relationships, rather than drowning in worry, consuming passive entertainment, or protecting yourself from failure. Produce value for the world much more than you consume things from the world. Producing is a happier activity, and the inevitable money surplus caused by this habit will allow you to capitalize on, rather than being crushed by, fluctuations in the general upward trend of those first two tips."

"...mental health is way, way, way more influenced by what you do with your body than most people assume."

"Mind" and "body" are linguistic distinctions, not objective realities.

Mr. Money Mustache’s Holiday Living Guide: "Your mind is not some ethereal bit of cosmic magic, accessible only by divine gods, psychotherapists or antidepressants. It’s simply a complex piece of meat connected to the rest of your meat systems. With this basic medical training you can quickly realize that mental health is way, way, way more influenced by what you do with your body than most people assume."

Exercise and Depression - Harvard Health: "A review of studies stretching back to 1981 concluded that regular exercise can improve mood in people with mild to moderate depression. It also may play a supporting role in treating severe depression."

"Fear of loss tends to prevent us from doing all the best stuff in life."

Lessons Learned From Having My Bike Stolen: "After calming down for a few minutes, more practical strategies started to emerge. Sure, my bike had been stolen. But this was the first theft in many, many years of very carefree living. The Craigslist replacement value of that bike was probably about $500. What value do I place on a decade of the fearless freedom of leaving shit happily unlocked and not worrying about it? How about the value of my time saved in not spending my life fumbling with an enormous keychain like my friend? 90 seconds a day for ten years is 91 hours, or at least $4500 of my time at $50 an hour. I was still coming out way ahead...

Don’t Confuse Bullshit with Safety 
This is a key flaw in human nature that will bring you great profit if you become aware of it: we tend to prioritize our own experience above real science when forming impressions of the world. And we also put more weight on scary and bad news than we do on good news (or an absence of news, which is usually good too). This form of judgement (along with other great human tendencies such as racism, fear of change and learning through gossip) was appropriate for most of human history since it was the best we could do before we had science and effortless worldwide communication. But nowadays, we can do better...

I resolved to continue my old life of not being fearful of crime. As any student of statistics knows, it is foolish to base your life on a single, isolated event. If things continued to get stolen from my back yard, I would eventually step up security measures. But for now, why not be free? Lesson Learned "

But How Does All This Make Me Rich? 
Fear of loss tends to prevent us from doing all the best stuff in life. Investing. Quitting our unsatisfying job or starting a new business. Building a fun and profitable local social network. Trying things that might result in minor bruises or embarrassing failure. Compulsive locking and protecting of our trinkets is not curing this fear – just masking it. Taking away the security blanket and just taking the risk breaks down the fear, and brings much better results over a lifetime."

In politics, logic need not apply.

Redpanels: redpill in comic form

"By deliberately limiting the irrelevant things you do and think about, you automatically become much, much better at the relevant things on which you spend your time."

How Big is your Circle of Control?: "You will have a much better life, if you focus your mental and physical energy ONLY on the things you can personally influence. Everything else is a distraction that pulls you away from running your life properly. But quite counter-intuitively, this smaller focus does not shrink your influence and your ability to do good. It causes these things to increase. Covey calls the range of everything you spend time thinking about your Circle of Concern. Similarly, everything you can actually influence is called your Circle of Control. For most people, the two circles look like this:

"But what will I do, if I’m not busy being concerned with things outside of my control? 

Now here’s the reason this counterintuitive mind trick works: By deliberately limiting the irrelevant things you do and think about, you automatically become much, much better at the relevant things on which you spend your time. The increases in your health, wealth, focus, network of friends, and knowledge of relevant things from reading library books and talking with other Highly Effective People will have the following effect on your circle of control"

Truth.

#SeemsLegit

"Conservative is a word created for the purpose of identity persuasion. Nothing more... What is a progressive? Same argument applies."

Identity politics trump everything/everyone's desperate for a tribe.  

The Conservative Con (Master Persuader Series) | Scott Adams Blog: "My best guess is that I’m in the top 20% of informed citizens. Yet I don’t know the political definition of conservative. Neither do you, in all likelihood.  Under the 2D filter of life, conservatives are united by a common ideology that is supported by reason. But under the Master Persuader filter, conservative is a word created for the purpose of identity persuasion. Nothing more. 

According to my filter, conservative has no logical or coherent reason for existing. While I assume it once had a noble birth, at this point it is just a hodgepodge of ideas that disagree with Democrats. Some of the individual ideas have merit, but they don’t belong together in the same bag for any reason that is obvious to me...

In 2016, the word conservative can be seen as a tool of influence – a shaming tool – used by the party elites to bring people together under their handpicked puppet. Conservative doesn’t have a normal definition that is useful and widely understood. That’s why it works so well for persuasion. 

If it had a rigid definition, lots of people could find a reason to disagree. But by leaving the definition of conservative in ambiguity, people see nothing with which they can disagree. That is classic persuasion. Trump uses the same form of strategic ambiguity. It’s a thing. 

Some of you will write coherent definitions of conservatism in the comments. I’m sure that definition exists. 

But if you walk out on the street and ask random Republicans to define what conservative means, they will probably say something about “small government” before voting for whoever is likely to increase its size, such as any of the Republican candidates still in the race...

Conservative is a word used by con men to maintain their power. So, Is Marco Rubio correct that Trump is a “con man”? Yes, Rubio is 100% right. Trump is a con man in a party of con people running against another party of con people.  He’s just better at it. 

P.S. - What is a progressive? I have no idea what that is either. Same argument applies. It is a word of persuasion, not reason."

"The problem with predictions of the future is the assumption that society coordinates itself rationally."

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

"Feminist glaciology builds from feminist postcolonial science studies... that are generally marginalized through colonialism, imperialism, inequality, unequal power relations, patriarchy, and the domination of Western science."

Stupidity should hurt.  This University of Oregon Study on Feminizing Glaciers Might Make You Root for Trump - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "What does gender theory have to do with climate change and the depiction of glaciers in popular culture? You can decide for yourself by reading what must be the least essential paper ever written: "Glaciers, Gender, and Science—A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental climate change."  

The recently published, utterly incomprehensible paper was co-authored by a team of historians at the University of Oregon, and funded via a grant from the National Science Foundation. I hope American taxpayers feel like they got their money's worth. 

From the abstract:  Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.  

You are probably wondering whether I am trolling you. You might be checking the date to make sure this isn't an April Fool's joke. Surely a satirist who set out to write a deliberate parody of left-wing papers using the jargon of the earnest social justice warrior could not have done a better job than a paper on "just and equitable human-ice interactions."  But the paper is real—very real. The University of Oregon, in fact, put out a glowing press release touting its existence...

I'm sure Carey is well-intentioned, but if his goal was to put a human face on climate change, he failed. The paper is simply impossible to read with a straight face. It employs liberal buzzwords—colonialism, marginalization, masculinist discourses, etc.—with such frequency that the entire thing comes off like a joke. 

Just try to follow along with this paragraph:  Feminist and postcolonial theories enrich and complement each other by showing how gender and colonialism are co-constituted, as well as how both women and indigenous peoples have been marginalized historically (Schnabel, 2014). Feminist glaciology builds from feminist postcolonial science studies, analyzing not only gender dynamics and situated knowledges, but also alternative knowledges and folk glaciologies that are generally marginalized through colonialism, imperialism, inequality, unequal power relations, patriarchy, and the domination of Western science (Harding, 2009).  

Remember, this is a paper about how to feminize a giant hunk of ice..."

"This is a direct attack on his 1st Amendment rights. A right... that belongs to everyone, regardless of intelligence deficiencies or possible retardation."

"You can't go teaching equality and then get your human rights panties in a bunch when it comes with a couple of wedgies.  Every asshole is entitled to his beliefs.  That's the yin and the yang of democracy."

Training.

3/7 - stretch, bench, db row, curls, pushups

3/4 - shadowbox

University Stupidity 2016: "Tiny Sombreros at Tequila Party Are Very Not OK. Fur Hats at Cold War Party Are Just Fine."

PSA to College Students: Hit & Run : Reason.com: "At Bowdoin College a couple of weekends ago, there were two parties happening on campus... 

Party #1: A "tequila"-themed birthday party where some participants wore tiny sombreros 

 Party #2: A official administration-sanctioned "Cold War" party, where students showed up in fur hats and at least one gal came costumed as Stalin. 

Guess which social gathering unleashed a massive omphaloskeptic upheaval at the Maine liberal arts college?

When pictures of the offending miniature Mexican headgear party showed up on social media sites, seemingly the entire campus swung into action. Rampell writes that Bowdoin administrators sent "multiple schoolwide emails notifying the students about an 'investigation' into a possible 'act of ethnic stereotyping.'" The tequila party hosts, at least one of whom is Colombian, will be forced to attend "an educational program facilitated by a faculty member," attend "Active Bystander training," 

...They have also been forced to move out of their dorms and have been banned from major social events, The Bowdoin Orient notes in an editorial. Two of the attendees at the tequila party (who do not themselves seem to have been hat wearers or hosts, though the details are unclear) are representatives in the student government. On Saturday, they will face impeachment by their peers. 

Accusations against the two include violation of the nondiscrimination policy, as well as "violation of the spirit of the Statement of Solidarity," which invokes the specter of "cultural appropriation," defined as "a power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systemically oppressed by that dominant group, perpetuates racist stereotypes, and/or misrepresents people’s culture." They are charged with having "made Latino, and especially Mexican, students feel unsafe."  

Student government politics are often the embodiment Sayre's Law, which posits that academic politics are so bitter precisely because the stakes are so low. The impeachment seems silly, but perhaps no sillier than plenty of other extracurricular group kerfuffles, which students are well within their rights to indulge in.  Far more troubling is the fact that administrators have taken disciplinary action and publicly shamed students for throwing a party with silly hats..."

The decade I was born in...

...it explains a lot, actually.

I don't get what the big deal is, really.