Training - "...believe in discipline as opposed to motivation."

4/21 - squats, bench, db row, pushups, situps, speed bag

4/20 - foam roll/mobility

4/19 - shadowbox, foam roll/mobility

Before After Female Muscle Bodybuilders and Weight Loss — Emillie-Jean Bisgrove-Cole:

“Am I Too Old To Get In Shape?” | Nerd Fitness: "Did you know you’re never too old to start? Yup. When 2014 Boston Marathon champion Meb Keflezighi was asked how long he thought he could continue competing at an elite level, now being over the age of 40, he responded: “If no one ever told you when you were born, how would you know how old you are?” Tamae Watanabe of Japan summited Mount Everest at the age of 73, 10 years after setting the previous record at 63! I met many Rebels over the age of 70, including Gay from New Mexico who is 73, has nine grandchildren, and lost 90 pounds on her journey! Believe it or not, we get emails from 30-year-olds explaining why they are too old – how it’s too late for them to get in shape, learn a skill, travel the world, etc. The problem is – whether you are 30 or 80 – if you believe you are too old you ARE too old.  This belief that you are too set in your ways to change becomes paralyzing...

Those who subscribe to the belief that they are “too old” see the person who declares “age is just a mindset” or “you’re never too old to change” as a naive or foolish statement. “They don’t understand. When they are my age/in my situation, they’ll get it.” And it’s hard to see the other side if you believe this about yourself. Really freakin’ hard. The belief has hardened so much that you can’t even realistically imagine yourself changing. But I’ve seen thousands upon thousands of people in the NF Rebellion change their mindset after proving to themselves they CAN change...

I am doing the Juggernaut Powerlifting Program and very much enjoying the process although I have lots to learn. I am so excited, I’ll be going to a full day fitness clinic in May! Can you imagine the looks when the old, grey haired broad walks in? There is no way that would have happened two years ago. I firmly believe in discipline as opposed to motivation. I am not in any way motivated to crawl out of bed at 4:45 in the morning to go to the gym, but I sure feel good when I get back home after a workout. Two days a week I have a Yoga guy come to my house and help me with mobility."

"There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other..." - Harriet Tubman

4 Ways Harriet Tubman Totally Kicked Ass From a Libertarian POV - Hit & Run : Reason.com: 

"1. She chose to live free or die and articulated that message for all to understand. "I had reasoned this out in my mind," she said, recalling the death of her master and the necessity of escape. "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted..." 

2. She exemplified higher-law theory, which holds that laws violating basic human rights are null and void regardless of the repressive superstructures created to legitimate and maintain them, and risked her life freeing about 70 other slaves as the "Moses" of the Underground Railroad. Her actions thus stemmed from a reading of rights that synchs with libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett's discussion of limits on government power...

3. She believed in armed self-defense, a radical-enough concept for poor whites, let alone renegade blacks. During her Underground Railroad missions, she carried a pistol both for protection against slave-catchers and, reportedly, to keep ambivalent "passengers" in line..."

"They say they want more diversity... But that's only true if "diversity" means "more of what I already think."

Prof Who Won't Recommend a Pro-Gun Student Is Everything That's Wrong with Academia - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A professor recently wrote a candid essay in which she confessed a secret: she didn't want to write a letter of recommendation for a student, solely because this student has different views (presumably) about gun rights. Note that the situation made the professor feel uncomfortable—not because she saw anything wrong with her stance, but because the sheer awkwardness of it was frustrating. How do you tell a student—one who is satisfactory in all relevant ways—that you can't recommend them because you suspect their political opinions don't completely align with yours?  

 The professor teaches at an unnamed college and used a pseudonym in her article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Arrogant, intolerant, and oblivious to her biases (and how destructive they are), she is everything that is wrong with modern higher education.  Seriously:  

 She seems to be a good kid, Sarah. And I don’t know what she really thinks of gun advocacy and political failures that have cost us all these lives and our sense of safety as educators. I don’t know what she does on the weekends. I also don’t know if she understands emotions, or what real rage feels like. It seems to me no person who has truly experienced the full impact of their own emotions would ever go near a gun.  So what do I do? Do I write her a recommendation because I originally said yes? Do I say no and explain myself? Do I ignore her email?  

 Reading the full column, it quickly becomes clear that the professor believes everyone who has encountered a gun and not recoiled in horror is a sociopath...

If anything, the professor seems to have an inexplicable fear of guns, though she is entitled to feel that way.  She is also entitled to decline to write a letter of recommendation. But—and this point needs to be stressed—her reasons for not wanting to recommend Sarah are abhorrent. Sarah's views about guns have nothing do with being a good student, and it's not even clear what her views are: she's merely made a couple vaguely pro-gun statements. It's cultural, rather than political: Sarah is the kind of person—a guns person—that the professor instinctively dislikes...

Adding to the irony of all this is the fact that liberal members of campus often pretend to want more diversity. They say they want more diversity initiatives, more funding for diversity projects, hiring that reflects greater diversity, etc. But that's only true if "diversity" means "more of what I already think." 

As Georgetown University professor John Hasnas, a libertarian, wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:  

In my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity. On the contrary, I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best résumés appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints. Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions..."

"Scandinavian countries became a real life version of the old joke about how to make a small fortune; you start with a large one."

Bernie's Right—America Should Be More Like Sweden - Reason.com: "During its laissez faire period, between 1850 and 1950, Swedish income per capita increased eightfold as the population doubled. Infant mortality fell from 15 to 2 percent, and life expectancy increased by a whopping 28 years. And all this happened before the welfare state was even a glint in the taxman's eye. As late as 1950, total taxes as a percent of GDP in Denmark and Sweden were not just lower than in other European countries but lower than in the U.S.: 20 and 19 percent, respectively, vs. 24 percent in America. 

 It was at this point, when we Scandinavians had satisfied our thirst, that we thought that we could turn our backs to the well. We began to regulate. We increased taxes and beefed up the public sector. It's easy to see how foreigners observing the implementation of these unorthodox policies might confuse cause and effect...

Instead, the Scandinavian countries became a real life version of the old joke about how to make a small fortune; you start with a large one. Sweden took democratic socialist policies further than its neighbors, and as a result its economy fell more steeply. Slowly but steadily the policies of Prime Ministers Tage Erlander and Olof Palme eroded productivity and the long-renowned Scandinavian work ethic. In 1970, Sweden was 25 percent richer than the OECD average. Twenty years later, the average had almost caught up with us. Once the fourth richest country on the planet, Sweden was now the fourteenth."

"The act of voting causes a sort of psychological blindness... Our brains are pattern-recognition machines, but not good ones."

The Value of Not Voting | Scott Adams Blog: "Anderson Cooper of CNN says he probably won’t vote in the coming election. He says voting would bias him when he covers political news. I agree. 

I call it the joiner problem. The minute you take a side, you start acquiring confirmation bias to bolster your sense of rightness. Objectivity is nearly impossible once you commit to a team.  The way confirmation bias works is that you can’t see it when you’re in it. Other people might be able to observe the bias in you, but by definition you can’t see it in yourself. The act of voting causes a sort of psychological blindness...

Our brains are pattern-recognition machines, but not good ones. We see patterns where there are none, and we miss patterns where they exist."

"Researchers all too often succumb to confirmation bias... in search of some kind of correlation that they can claim is "significant.""

Apparently Everyone Now Agrees Science Is Badly Broken - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "One key problem is that the types of research most likely to make it from lab benches into leading scientific journals are those containing flashy never-before-reported results. Such findings are often too good to check. 'All of the incentives are for researchers to write a good story—to provide journal editors with positive results, clean results, and novel results,' notes the University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek. 'This creates publication bias, and that is likely to be the central cause of the proliferation of false discoveries.'""

Apparently Everyone Now Agrees Science Is Badly Broken - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "...most people want to climb the professional ladder. The main way to do that if you’re a scientist is to get grants and publish lots of papers. The problem is that journals have a clear preference for research showing strong, positive relationships – between a particular medical treatment and improved health, for example. This means researchers often try to find those sorts of results. A few go as far as making things up. But a huge number tinker with their research in ways they think are harmless, but which can bias the outcome...

Researchers all too often succumb to confirmation bias by sorting through the statistical debris of their experiments, p-hacking and HARKing - in search of some kind of correlation that they can claim is "significant."

...If peer review is good at anything, it appears to be keeping unpopular ideas from being published. Consider the finding of another (yes, another) of these replicability studies, this time from a group of cancer researchers. In addition to reaching the now unsurprising conclusion that only a dismal 11 percent of the preclinical cancer research they examined could be validated after the fact, the authors identified another horrifying pattern: The “bad” papers that failed to replicate were, on average, cited far more often than the papers that did! 

...once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons."

Training.

4/18 - deadlift, press, chins, dips, curls, foamroll/mobility

The Healthiest Old Person on the Planet Explains How to Stay in Shape | VICE | Canada: "Charles Eugster is the greatest British sprinter you've probably never heard of. He currently holds world records in the 200m (indoor) and 400m (outdoor) sprints, as well as British records in the 60m (indoor), 100m (outdoor), and 200m (outdoor). A couple of weeks ago, he narrowly missed out on the world record for the 60m sprint after pulling his hamstring halfway through. He still won the race to become European Champion. It's an impressive record, given that the man—by pretty well established standards—shouldn't be able to cross a road without help, let alone run. He is 96 years old. The London-born ex-dentist, who now lives in Switzerland, is arguably the fittest senior citizen on the planet. He's also a body-builder, a public speaker, a writer, a rower, a wakeboarder, an entrepreneur, and a budding fashion designer, planning his own line in elderly couture. But more than anything, he is a professional death defier who hasn't just slowed the ravages of aging, but reversed them all together: where once white pubic hairs grew, he says, brown ones now flourish...

I was 87 and realized my body was deteriorating. I had a muffin-top waist and my muscles were getting weaker and weaker. I felt so old. But because I was so vain, I didn't like the idea of it at all. So I joined a body-building gym and employed a personal trainer who was a Mr. Universe to rebuild my body from scratch.

Nine years on, at 96, do you feel old now?
Not at all. I feel like a youngster of 60, tops. Being fit is a wonderful thing. Before I turned 90, I got severe colds every November, but now they've completely stopped—I've had two in six years. I'll tell you something else: strength training increases your libido."

What do you eat to stay in shape?
Variety is key. I start every day with a protein shake because, as you get older, your protein synthesis no longer functions as well. I avoid sugar and eat lots of meat, especially fat. I've been on a fat trip lately. Fat! Piles of fat. Yet, I was in a supermarket the other day and was perplexed to find yogurt with zero fat. What on earth is that? The idea of the nutrition pyramid where, at the top, is a little fat and meat, and at the bottom a lot of carbohydrates, is, excuse me, bullshit. Humans are so unbelievably stupid that we have begun to tinker with food. Our theories of nutrition have resulted in a pandemic of obesity. Can you imagine a hunter-gatherer enjoying a low-fat yogurt?"

foreverhumble77: I personally like this one...:

Momoa getting jacked for Aquaman/Justice League.