Effects, not intentions.

The 1994 Crime Bill Was A Liberal Policy - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "The focus on intentionality in politics is a distraction. The effects policies have on real people matter, not the intentions of the politicians first proposing them. Evaluating how policies will play out on the ground is a more effective way of protecting people from government abuses than the parlor game of trying to divine what's in someone's heart."

Training.

4/8 - squats, bench, db row, db inc bench, situps, compression floss

4/7 - stretch, foam roll, knee tucks

4/6 - shadowbox, stretch, foam roll, headstand

"Intolerance of Sexy Peers: Intrasexual Competition Among Women."

Heh.  Amy Schumer hates being lumped in with fat women: "Amy, you see, is all about challenging those sexist stereotypes about women and Hollywood’s obsession with thin women! ‘I might weigh 160 lbs,’ she once bragged, ‘but I can catch a dick whenever I want.’ Yes, that’s such an accomplishment. Getting some guy to schlong you. Stunning and brave indeed. Unfortunately, Amy is only interested in challenging body images when she isn’t being compared to actual fat women. Glamour Magazine recently included Amy with some other ‘plus-size’ women, and Amy was not impressed. She took to Instagram and Twitter to complain that she was being compared to Melissa McCarthy (really fat), Adele (quite fat) and Ashley Graham (fat)...

Here’s my theory as to why that happens: women want to talk about women’s fat as beautiful to convince other women to get fat, and reduce sexual competition. Think about Amy Schumer: Fat is beautiful, she exclaims! I’m beautiful! I can fuck any guy I want! I’m only fat in Hollywood! But what does Amy do when lumped in with actual fat women? She immediately makes sure everyone knows she’s not actually fat (I’m a size 6-8, not a 12 or higher...)

Amy will gush over Adele and Ashley and Melissa, because she wants other women to be as fat as they are. The more fat women there are, the more her size 6 starts to look lean and mean. It always comes down to sexual economics with women...

Feminism is collective bargaining for women to keep the price of women high. Women used to keep their own prices high when they controlled access to sex, but the sexual revolution destroyed that quite nicely, leaving women bereft of power. Now women are in full out, cut throat competition with one another, while pretending to be part of a sisterhood of love and acceptance. Ha! Bullshit. Pretty much all women will aggress against a sexy peer...

In current year, all it takes for women to pull ahead of the competition is to not be overweight. All it takes to get run over is to gain weight. So what do women do? To appear supportive and loving towards other women, they praise the overweight and insist fat women are beautiful. But try including a smaller woman with her fatter counterparts, and the fangs come out. Right, Amy? Fat women are lovely, as long as they are beneath you in the hierarchy. And the more women you can convince to join them, the less competition you have. It’s clever. It’s also cruel. No one hates other women quite like women do."

Almost all women aggress against a sexy peer - ScienceBlog.com:  "A study published in the journal Aggressive Behavior confirms what is often seen on the popular reality show The Bachelor: that most women aggress against sexual rivals. Although it is well documented that males of different species, including humans, aggressively compete with one another for sexual access to females (intrasexual competition), far less is known about  how females compete with one another for the attention of males. University of Ottawa professor Tracy Vaillancourt’s research supports the idea that women do engage in intrasexual competition through the use of aggression.

The Bachelor provides insight into the cut-throat tactics women use to “compete” and demonstrates that vying for the affections of an eligible bachelor tends to bring out the worst in women. It often leads them to gossip about a rival’s level of promiscuity or disparage her appearance, so as to reduce her “mate value.” Professor Vaillancourt’s study demonstrates that this type of behaviour is not only a TV phenomenon, but also a reality in our schools, workplaces, etc. 

Researchers conducted two experiments to examine this phenomenon...

Results showed that almost all women were aggressive toward the attractive female whose only indiscretion was to dress in a sexually provocative manner. The women in this situation were more likely to roll their eyes at their peer, stare her up and down and show anger while she was in the room. When she left the room, many of them laughed at her, ridiculed her appearance, and/or suggested that she was sexually available. By contrast, when the same attractive peer was dressed conservatively, the group of women assigned to this second scenario barely noticed her, and none of them discussed her when she left the room. 

A second experiment confirmed that the sexy colleague was indeed seen as a sexual rival by women. Results indicated that women did not want to introduce her to their boyfriend, allow him to spend time alone with her, or be friends with her. Collectively, these results provide support for the idea that women do engage in intrasexual competition by aggressing towards sexy female counterparts. View full article: Vaillancourt, T.& Sharma, A. (2011).  Intolerance of sexy peers: Intrasexual competition among women. Aggressive Behavior, 37, 569-577. doi: 10.1002/ab.20413"

Trust the Government. They know what they're doing.

CIA left explosive material on Loudoun school bus after training exercise - The Washington Post: "The CIA left “explosive training material” under the hood of a Loudoun County school bus after a training exercise last week, a bus that was used to ferry elementary and high school students to and from school on Monday and Tuesday with the material still sitting in the engine compartment, according to the CIA and Loudoun County officials.

The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and the CIA said in statements Thursday that the explosive material was left behind after a training exercise at Briar Woods High School during spring break...

Authorities held a joint training program at Briar Woods from March 21 to 24.  Loudoun schools spokesman Wayde Byard said the CIA indicated the nature of the material but asked the school system not to disclose it. 

Byard described it as a “putty-type” material designed for use on the battlefield and which requires a special detonator; such putty, or plastic, explosives — including the well-known C-4 — are used in demolition and are considered stable. Byard said law enforcement agencies use school facilities on occasion to conduct realistic training exercises, including active-shooter drills. As part of last week’s training exercise, CIA trainers placed explosive material into the engine compartment of a school bus on Thursday to test a dog’s ability to sniff it out. They also placed the material in parts of the school."

"Because anytime a child is unsupervised, a parent must be arrested. It's as simple as that."

World gone mad.  Mom Arrested for Letting Kids Walk to McDonald's Around the Corner - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A South Carolina mom who let her 9-year-old nephew walk her 3-year-old son to the McDonald's less than a quarter mile away has been—I'm sure you can finish this sentence in your sleep by now—arrested and charged with child neglect. 

The reason? According to WSPA News 7: The officer says the boys had to cross a street and pass several businesses and homes to get to the eatery, putting their safety at risk. 

...when the kids were spotted without an adult, or drone, or armored tank to keep them safe, the cops swooped in and accompanied them back to their home. Then the Spartanburg police department then issued an arrest warrant for mom. Because anytime a child is unsupervised, a parent must be arrested. It's as simple as that. 

...imagine if your own childhood had been lived under constant, state-mandated adult supervision. How many adventures would you have had? How much joy? How many memories with your friends and cousins?"

#FeelsTrue

"...we sort of self medicate in order to not feel tired and when we do that, we actually erode our sleep quality."

I really need to get my sleep worked out.  Great podcast ep.  Robb Wolf - Paleo Solution Podcast - Episode 314 - Sarah Ballantyne - Sleep: "...when you look at the impact of that sleep has on the central nervous system, on the immune system, on our hormones, on our metabolism, it's so fundamental and if you think of anyone of those systems being out of whack, you're not going to be healthy...

We're missing this linchpin that is holding everything together, which by the way, when you get enough sleep, your hunger is regulated. You don't have cravings. You naturally want to eat more fruits and vegetables and you naturally feel more motivated to move.

 Here's one of my favorite statistics. Sleeping less than 6 hours per night which about 35% of Americans do increases risks of all cost mortality by 12%. So that's a really general measure that looks at both health and longevity when you look at all cost mortality. Being morbidly obese increases risks of all cost mortality by 18%. For every hour of sedentary time that you're placed with physical activity, you reduce all cost mortality by 16% and for every serving, daily serving of vegetables up to 5 servings, reduce risks of all cost mortality by 5%, which means we're talking about sleep being in the same ballpark in terms of health risks as being obese, being inactive and not eating vegetables...  and sleep is the first thing that people are willing to give up for everything else in their life.

We put work and play before sleep. On average, we are sleeping an hour and a half to 2 hours less per night than we were 50 years ago and when you have -- this is fundamental, but how much time that is total per year. So most of the scientist of sleep is actually looking at metabolic syndromes. They're looking at diabetes, cardiovascular disease risk factor and obesity or one piece of that pie, but within those studies, there is some really interesting insights.

So for example, it looks like it's really important for our sleep time to be synced with the sun. So if you look at hunter gatherers, the sun goes down and they kind of have their quiet more intimate time. They tend to fall asleep about 2 hours after the sun goes down. They tend to wake up around sunrise or an hour before sunrise depending on the time of year. So they're actually spending typically about 9 hours in bed, a little bit longer in the winter, and then when you subtract off sleep latency time, that's adding up to about 7 hours of sleep. It's not just time in bed...

So you turn out the light at 10. You're alarm went off at 6, but you really only slept 6 and a half hours in that period of time and that's really important I think for most of us to understand that we tend to statistically speaking, we over estimate how much we sleep by about 48 minutes. But the less that you sleep, the more you overestimate how much you're sleeping. So if you're sleeping 5 hours a night, you tend to overestimate by an hour and 20 minutes whereas if you sleep 7 hours a night, you're only on average overestimating your sleep by 20 minutes.

So that's like the first thing to keep in mind here is that we're talking about adults having a bed time, which I realize this is supposed to be one of the rites of passage of becoming adults that we no longer have to go to bed at a certain time.

Robb Wolf: You have the right to completely metabolically derange yourself. You have the right to eat an entire box of coco puffs as well. 

So keep that in mind that there are certain things that we grow up with like having a healthy breakfast that are pretty good patterns to maintain through adulthood and having a bed time is one of them. So what we know is that having a very regular sleep patterns so one of the things that increases risks of obesity is variability in terms of what time we go to bed, what time we wake up and how long we sleep.

So if you have that very typical pattern of 'I go to bed a little bit earlier because I have to wake up early on weeknights and then on the weekend, I'm going to stay up late, but I'm going to sleep in' that can increase risks of obesity by as much as 14%. But if your variability and how long you sleep varies by more than about an hour standard deviation, so I go to bed at 10 on weeknights, but I stay up till 1 on Saturday night, that increases risks of obesity by 63%.

So having a really consistent bed time ideally, the time shouldn't vary by more than about 30 minutes and a really consistent wake time and we should never need to sleep to catch for our sleep. We should never have a sleep debt. We know from studies looking at sleep in the immune system that inadequate sleep, so getting short sleep, not necessarily is inflammatory and it stimulates all components of the immune system that are up to shenanigans in autoimmune disease and when you go to recovery from sleep, you go to sleep in over the weekend, that's not sufficient time to fully regulate the immune system.

So there are aspects of the immune system like TH17 cells that remain over stimulated even after 2 days of getting enough sleep and paying down that sleep debt.  So we know that we need consistency in bed time. We know that we want total fleet to equal that 7 hours, but for most people is 8 and a half to 9 hours in bed and so I was recommending, what time do you have to get up in the morning and we have responsibilities. We have jobs. Most of us have things that get us up in the morning if it's not young kids or both the kids and the job. So what time do you have to get up in the morning? So my alarm personally set for 6:30 in the morning. So if I calculate back 9 hours, that means that I have to turn out my light at 9:30 and I think that this is really the number 1 barrier that most people face to getting enough sleep is taking their bodies, putting them into their beds early enough that they actually have enough time to get enough sleep, turning out the light, turning off the TV and closing their eyes.

There are lots of things that we can do to support sleep quality from there like managing stress and then transient circadian rhythms and being in a dark environment in the evenings and being outside in bright 18 light during the day, not eating sugar in the evenings, right. There are lots of things that we can do to support sleep quality, but the number one thing that we are just not doing is putting sleep high up enough up on the to-do list that we are actually getting it.

Robb Wolf: Got yeah, got yeah. Just a little bit on the -- you mentioned sugar in the evening. It seems like I've seen is much material on evening carbohydrates either improving or making sleep worse. What are your thoughts on that, like since now, it's just like, oh you just have to play with and see, like what do you think is going on there? 

Sarah Balantyne: There's a very big difference in terms of the hormonal response to sugar versus starchy carbs, right, and so what we seen in studies that actually differentiate between those is that having a good serving of a starchy vegetables at dinner and the optimal time frame is 4 to 5 hours before bed dramatically improves sleep quality. So there is this 2-hour window before bed where eating anything whether it's carbohydrates, whether it's protein, eating anything within 2 hours before bed basically gets your metabolism roughed up, gets your growth hormone spiking and those are things that are going to erode sleep quality. So there is this optimal window of eating about 4 to 5 hours before bed depending on schedule.

I mean, sciences are so cut and dried that there is a reason why pushing it to 2 hours before bed if that fits with people's schedules would be inappropriate, but then there is this whole separate side of things looking at added sugars. They're looking at high fructose corn syrup and sugary drinks and this very, very different quality of carbohydrate and showing that consuming sugars, any simple sugars, things like sucrose and glucose and fructose from mid afternoon on basically starts you on that wonderful insulin roller coaster that will erode sleep quality.

So my general recommendation is to include a serving of starchy carbs to blood sugar regulation levels. So for each of us, it's a little bit different, right. Some people can do -- typically people could do 30 to 45 grams of carbohydrates with dinner and be okay, that sort of like the American Diabetes Association guidelines for maximum carbohydrates within a meal for regulating blood sugars even in diabetics. Some people can handle more.

So starchy carbs to blood sugar regulation with dinner and then don't eat. I think a lot of us eat to stay awake at night. It’s one of my like worst food habits is 7 to 8 o'clock rolls around and I’m like what can I snack on.  Really, I should just go to bed. It’s such a common thing that we mistaken fatigue for hunger and then we end up again, right, so then we end up eating which erodes sleep quality and it becomes another crap. So some people reach for caffeine and some people reach for sugar, and I mean, I reach for both. I'm going to put myself in that category. I like my caffeine in the morning and my sugar in the evening.

...but that's such a common thing that we sort of self medicate in order to not feel tired and when we do that, we actually erode our sleep quality, which then sets us up for just a snowball of bad."

Training.

4/5 - deadlift, press, chins, dips, curls, stretch, bw row, db side swings

4/4 - shadowbox, bridge, stretch

Focus on Progress Not Perfection — Tony Horton Life: "Perfection can be a slippery slope. Waiting until something is perfect could very well have you missing out on what’s occurring right now, and set you up to feel like a failure over and over.   Yes, I am a big advocate for failing; getting back up, going again, and again and again, but there are those of us who don’t even start, or who think we will be happier when we reach some end goal that is “perfect” in our mind.

Perfectionism keeps us in a box; a very small one. It keeps us from stepping out of our comfort zone and holds us in a pattern of living in the “when, then” mindset. For example, “When I am 20 pounds thinner, then I will be happy.”  “When I make x dollars, then I will be successful.” You get the idea.   I find it more empowering to keep my focus on Progress; the progress that happens each and every day, with each and every workout, with each and every idea and with each and every attempt to do something new.   Because the truth is, we are always making progress in some way, as long as we are continuing to take action. If you are working out every day, you are making progress. If you are eating healthy, but maybe slip up here and there, you are still making progress...  I will say that perfectionism wears on us. It wears on our soul and how we show up in life, and holds us back from doing the things we need to be doing. Don’t let it run your life, take action anyway no matter how it looks."

Raising your hand & clapping both violate student safety.

Raised Hands Violate University Safe-Space Policy - Hit & Run : Reason.com: ""In a free and liberal society such as ours, it is imperative that people remain able to express their views, regardless of what others may think of them," it states. "This is currently not possible at the University of Edinburgh."  "The more ideas we challenge and discuss in public, the likelier we are to arrive at a moral and serious truth," Peters continued Peters. "I believe an institution which upholds the principles of free speech and diversity is superior to a Students’ Association that patronises its own students by insinuating that they cannot handle opinions that differ from their own. We are adults, we do not need condescension or safeguarding. EUSA does their students a huge disservice by engaging in this malpractice.""