Reading, Summer '19.

Bruce Lee: A Life by Matthew Polly

Zero Cool by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange

Drug of Choice by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange

Judgment by Joseph Finder

Finally, Some Good News by Delicious Tacos

This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life by Annie Grace

Elevating Overman by Bruce Ferber

LEGACY, Books 1-7 by Gerald Welch and Warren Murphy

The Carnivore Diet Holiday Handbook: How to Thrive & Survive the Holidays on a Carnivore Diet by K. Suzanne

How to Fight a Hydra: Face Your Fears, Pursue Your Ambitions, and Become the Hero You Are Destined to Be by Josh Kaufman

Everyone Loves You When You're Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness by Neil Strauss

The Truth: Sex, Love, Commitment, and the Puzzle of the Male Mind by Neil Strauss

The Frugal Carnivore Diet: How I Eat a Carnivore Diet for $4 a Day by K. Suzanne

Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge by Larry Correia and John Ringo

Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners by Larry Correia and John Ringo

Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints by Larry Correia and John Ringo

The Monster Hunter Files (Anthology) – by Larry Correia, Jim Butcher & others

Monster Hunter Guardian (Monster Hunters International Book 7) by Larry Correia and Sarah A. Hoyt

--

Wolverine: Old Man Logan Vol. 10: End Of The World by Ed Brisson (Author), Ryan Cady (Author), Damian Couceiro (Illustrator, Artist), Ibraim Roberson (Illustrator, Artist), Andrea Sorrentino (Cover Art), Di Meo, Simone (Artist), Hayden Sherman (Artist)

Dead Man Logan Vol. 1: Sins Of The Father by Ed Brisson (Author), Declan Shalvey (Cover Art), Mike Henderson (Artist)

Black Hammer Volume 3: Age of Doom Part One by Jeff Lemire (Author), Dean Ormston (Illustrator), Dave Stewart (Illustrator)

Black Hammer Volume 2: The Event by Jeff Lemire (Author), Dean Ormston (Illustrator), Dave Stewart (Illustrator), David Rubin (Illustrator)

Injustice: Gods Among Us Year Four - The Complete Collection (Injustice: Gods Among Us by Brian Buccellato (Author), Tom Taylor (Author), Bruno Redondo (Illustrator,

Black Hammer Volume 1: Secret Origins by Jeff Lemire (Author), Dean Ormston (Illustrator)

Return of Wolverine by Charles Soule (Author), Steve McNiven (Illustrator, Cover Art, Artist), Declan Shalvey (Artist)

The Boys Omnibus Vol. 1 & 2 by Garth Ennis (Author), Darick Robertson (Artist)

Stumptown Vol. 4: The Case of a Cup of Joe by Greg Rucka (Author), Justin Greenwood (Illustrator), Ryan Hill (Illustrator)

Plastic Man Paperback by Gail Simone (Author), Adriana Melo (Illustrator)

Atomic Robo and the Dawn of a New Era by Brian Clevinger (Author), Scott Wegener (Illustrator)

"That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham."

"America's War on Drugs" from the History Channel was excellent.

The History Channel Is Finally Telling the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs:  "For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the world’s largest drug cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America....

There’s no mealy mouthed truckling about what happened. The first episode opens with the voice of Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine CIA officer, declaring, “The agency was elbow deep with drug traffickers.” Then Richard Stratton, a marijuana smuggler turned writer and television producer, explains, “Most Americans would be utterly shocked if they knew the depth of involvement that the Central Intelligence Agency has had in the international drug trade.” Next, New York University professor Christian Parenti tells viewers, “The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger agenda of fighting communism.” 

For the next eight hours, the series sprints through history that’s largely the greatest hits of the U.S. government’s partnership with heroin, hallucinogen, and cocaine dealers. That these greatest hits can fill up most of four two-hour episodes demonstrates how extraordinarily deep and ugly the story is. First we learn about the CIA working with Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante Jr. in the early 1960s. The CIA wanted Fidel Castro dead and, in return for Trafficante’s help in various assassination plots, was willing to turn a blind eye to the extensive drug trafficking by Trafficante and his allied Cuban exiles. 

Then there’s the extremely odd tale of how the CIA imported significant amounts of LSD from its Swiss manufacturer in hopes that it could be used for successful mind control. Instead, by dosing thousands of young volunteers including Ken Kesey, Whitey Bulger, and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the agency accidentally helped popularize acid and generate the 1960s counterculture of psychedelia. 

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied with anti-communist forces in Laos that leveraged our support to become some of the largest suppliers of opium on earth. Air America, a CIA front, flew supplies for the guerrillas into Laos and then flew drugs out, all with the knowledge and protection of U.S. operatives. The same dynamic developed in the 1980s as the Reagan administration tried to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The planes that secretly brought arms to the contras turned around and brought cocaine back to America, again shielded from U.S. law enforcement by the CIA. 

Most recently, there’s our 16-year-long war in Afghanistan. While less has been uncovered about the CIA’s machinations here, it’s hard not to notice that we installed Hamid Karzai as president while his brother apparently was on the CIA payroll and, simultaneously, one of the country’s biggest opium dealers. Afghanistan now supplies about 90 percent of the world’s heroin."

Reading - Winter 17/18.

Infinite by Jeremy Robinson

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler and Shaun Whiteside

The Force: A Novel by Don Winslow

Working for Bigfoot by Jim Butcher,‎ Vincent Chong 

Orphan X: A Novel by Gregg Hurwitz

The Nowhere Man: An Orphan X Novel by Gregg Hurwitz

Hellbent: An Orphan X Novel by Gregg Hurwitz

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

The Kill Clause by Gregg Hurwitz

The Night Trade (A Livia Lone Novel Book 2) by Barry Eisler

Journey to Star Wars The Last Jedi: The Legends of Luke Skywalker by Ken Liu

Star Trek: Discovery: Desperate Hours by David Mack

Black Road Volume 1: The Holy North by Brian Wood (Author),‎ Garry Brown (Artist),‎ Dave McCaig (Artist)

Black Road Volume 2: A Pagan Death Paperback by Brian Wood (Author),‎ Garry Brown (Artist),‎ Dave McCaig (Artist)

Batman: The Dark Knight: The Master Race by Frank Miller (Author, Illustrator),‎ Brian Azzarello (Author),‎ Andy Kubert (Illustrator),‎ Klaus Janson (Illustrator),‎ John Romita (Illustrator),‎ Eduardo Risso (Illustrator)

The Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade by Frank Miller (Author),‎ Brian Azzarello (Author),‎ John Romita (Illustrator),‎ Peter Steigerwald (Illustrator)

Batman/The Flash: The Button Deluxe Edition by Joshua Williamson (Author),‎ Tom King (Author),‎ Jason Fabok (Illustrator),‎ Howard Porter (Illustrator)

Lazarus Vol. 5: Cull by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark

Happy! Deluxe Edition Paperback by Grant Morrison (Author),‎ Darick Robertson (Artist)

James Bond Vol. 2: Eidolon by Warren Ellis and Jason Masters

The Joker by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo

Kill Your Boyfriend by Grant Morrison and Philip Bond

Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette

Clean Room Vol. 1: Immaculate Conception  by Gail Simone (Author),‎ Jon Davis-Hunt (Illustrator)

FreakAngels Vol. 1 by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield

Deathstroke Vol. 1: The Professional  by Christopher Priest (Author),‎ Carlo Pagulayan (Illustrator),‎ Mark Morales (Illustrator),‎ James Bennett (Illustrator),‎ Belardino Brabo (Illustrator),‎ Jason Paz (Illustrator)

The King by Rich Koslowski (Author)

Star Wars: Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Shattered Empire by Greg Rucka (Author),‎ Marco Checchetto (Illustrator),‎ Phil Noto (Illustrator)

"Culture is a game."

Don't throw the LSD.

"The invasion of France was made possible by the drugs. Rommel and all those tank commanders were high."

High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history | Books | The Guardian: "“I guess drugs weren’t a priority for the historians,” he says. “A crazy guy like me had to come along.” Still, crazy or not, he has done a remarkable job. 

Ian Kershaw, the British historian who is probably the world’s leading authority on Hitler and Nazi Germany, has described it as “a serious piece of scholarship”. 

Unlikely as it sounds, it was Ohler’s friend, the Berlin DJ Alexander Kramer, who first put him on to the idea. “He’s like a medium for that time,” says Ohler. “He has this huge library, and he knows all the music from the 20s. One night he said to me: ‘Do you know the massive role drugs played in National Socialism?’ I told him that I didn’t, but that it sounded true – and I knew immediately it would be the subject of my next book.” His plan was to write a novel, but with his first visit to the archives that changed completely. 

There he found the papers of Dr Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, previously only a minor character in most studies of the Führer. “I knew then that this was already better than fiction.” In the months that followed, supported by the late, great German historian of the Third Reich Hans Mommsen, Ohler travelled from archive to archive, carefully gathering his material – and how much of it there was! He didn’t use half of what he found. “Look at this,” he says, jumping up. When he returns, in his hand is a copy of a letter from Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, in which he suggests that the “medication” Morell is giving the Führer needs to be regulated for the sake of his increasingly wobbly health...

Some drugs, however, had their uses, particularly in a society hell bent on keeping up with the energetic Hitler (“Germany awake!” the Nazis ordered, and the nation had no choice but to snap to attention). A substance that could “integrate shirkers, malingerers, defeatists and whiners” into the labour market might even be sanctioned. At a company called Temmler in Berlin, Dr Fritz Hauschild, its head chemist, inspired by the successful use of the American amphetamine Benzedrine at the 1936 Olympic Games, began trying to develop his own wonder drug – and a year later, he patented the first German methyl-amphetamine. Pervitin, as it was known, quickly became a sensation, used as a confidence booster and performance enhancer by everyone from secretaries to actors to train drivers (initially, it could be bought without prescription). It even made its way into confectionery. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight,” went the slogan. Women were recommended to eat two or three, after which they would be able to get through their housework in no time at all – with the added bonus that they would also lose weight, given the deleterious effect Pervitin had on the appetite. Ohler describes it as National Socialism in pill form."

Doping in Sport - Benzedrine: "Benzedrine is a trade name for amphetamine. The Council of Europe says it first appeared in sport at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. It was produced in 1887 and the derivative, Benzedrine, was isolated in the U.S. in 1934 by Gordon Alles. Its perceived effects gave it the street name "speed". British troops used 72 million amphetamine tablets in the Second World War and the RAF got through so many that "Methedrine won the Battle of Britain" according to one report. "

High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history | Books | The Guardian:

"In 1940, as plans were made to invade France through the Ardennes mountains, a “stimulant decree” was sent out to army doctors, recommending that soldiers take one tablet per day, two at night in short sequence, and another one or two tablets after two or three hours if necessary. The Wehrmacht ordered 35m tablets for the army and Luftwaffe, and the Temmler factory increased production. The likes of Böll, it’s fair to say, wouldn’t need to ask their parents for Pervitin again. Was Blitzkrieg, then, largely the result of the Wehrmacht’s reliance on crystal meth? How far is Ohler willing to go with this? He smiles. “Well, Mommsen always told me not to be mono-causal. But the invasion of France was made possible by the drugs. No drugs, no invasion. When Hitler heard about the plan to invade through Ardennes, he loved it [the allies were massed in northern Belgium]. But the high command said: it’s not possible, at night we have to rest, and they [the allies] will retreat and we will be stuck in the mountains. But then the stimulant decree was released, and that enabled them to stay awake for three days and three nights. Rommel [who then led one of the panzer divisions] and all those tank commanders were high – and without the tanks, they certainly wouldn’t have won...

When Hitler fell seriously ill in 1941, however, the vitamin injections that Morell had counted on no longer had any effect – and so he began to ramp things up. First, there were injections of animal hormones for this most notorious of vegetarians, and then a whole series of ever stronger medications until, at last, he began giving him a “wonder drug” called Eukodal, a designer opiate and close cousin of heroin whose chief characteristic was its potential to induce a euphoric state in the patient (today it is known as oxycodone). It wasn’t long before Hitler was receiving injections of Eukodal several times a day. Eventually he would combine it with twice daily doses of the high grade cocaine he had originally been prescribed for a problem with his ears, following an explosion in the Wolf’s Lair, his bunker on the eastern front. Did Morell deliberately turn Hitler into an addict? Or was he simply powerless to resist the Führer’s addictive personality? 

“I don’t think it was deliberate,” says Ohler. “But Hitler trusted him. When those around him tried to remove Morell in the fall of 1944, Hitler stood up for him – though by then, he knew that if he was to go, he [Hitler] would be finished. They got along very well. Morell loved to give injections, and Hitler liked to have them. He didn’t like pills because of his weak stomach and he wanted a quick effect. He was time-pressed; he thought he was going to die young.” When did Hitler realise he was an addict? “Quite late. Someone quotes him as saying to Morell: you’ve been giving me opiates all the time. But mostly, they talked about it in oblique terms. Hitler didn’t like to refer to the Eukodal. Maybe he was trying to block it off from his mind. And like any dealer, Morell was never going to say: yeah, you’re addicted, and I have something to feed that for you.” So he talked in terms of health rather than addiction? “Yes, exactly.”"

"The effect of the drugs could appear to onlookers to be little short of miraculous. One minute the Führer was so frail he could barely stand up. The next, he would be ranting unstoppably at Mussolini..."

"We begin with a radical conjecture: western philosophy was triggered by the intake of psychedelics..."

The Hidden Psychedelic History of Philosophy: Plato, Nietzsche, and 11 Other Philosophers Who Used Mind-Altering Drugs | High Existence:  "Plato’s philosophy was inspired by psychedelic intake, and western philosophy was inspired by Plato. The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947) is known for claiming that, The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato...

There, at the Temple of Demeter, participants would drink a potion—kykeon—containing barley, mint and water. It is widely believed that the kykeon contained too a psychedelic element. What that element was is widely contested, that it was psychedelic is less contested. Dr Albert Hofmann, the creator of LSD, argued that the compound was derived from the barley parasite fungus ergot, from which LSD is also derived. Hofmann writes,

[We can] assume that the barley grown [in the Rarian plain] was host to an ergot containing … the soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids. The famous Rarian plain was adjacent to Eleusis. Indeed this may well have led to the choice of Eleusis for Demeter’s temple … 

Within the darkened temple, participants had to exclaim: “I have fasted, I have drunk the kykeon”. What happened thereafter is, as the name of the event signals, mysterious—but in the Phaedrus Plato gives this account: 

[W]ith a blessed company—we following in the train of Zeus, and others in that of some other god—… saw the blessed sight and vision and were initiated into that which is rightly called the most blessed of mysteries, which we celebrated in a state of perfection … being permitted as initiates to the sight of perfect and simple and calm and happy apparitions, which we saw in the pure light, being ourselves pure and not entombed in this which we carry about with us and call the body, in which we are imprisoned like an oyster in its shell.

Thus is it quite plausible that psychedelics inspired the mind-body dualism prevalent in the west, not only in philosophy but also in religion: Plato’s influence on Christianity was substantial—Nietzsche even claimed that ‘Christianity was Platonism for the “people”.’ Regardless of the validity or not of Plato’s arguments, his thinking informed and enlightened our culture. Through a cave darkly, Plato came to see the light; this sunbeam of philosophy, science and reason sprang from the psychedelic experience..."

Stanhope Gets It.

Drugs made us human.

Archaeology Continues to Reinforce the Truth That Human History Has Been One Long Trip | The Daily Grail: "What did catch my attention though is the following image from the paper, which maps archaeological sites in Eurasia that have been found to contain cannabis remains that date to more than 3000 years ago (ie. 1000 BCE). What this clearly shows is how widespread the usage of cannabis was in ancient times, with some of the dates stretching back well before the advent of written records. In his wonderful book The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia*, Paul Devereux offers fascinating insights into how not only cannabis, but many other psychoactive plants, have been used the world over for millennia, often for ceremonial and/or religious/mystical reasons. It is one hell of an eye-opening read, especially for those who think 'tripping' was something that started with the counterculture of the 1960s, and I can't recommend it highly enough (no pun intended)! Understanding this fact makes modern culture's outlawing of many of these plants as even more nonsensical than it already is. Our ancestors across the globe have actively used these plants as both physical and spiritual medicine for at least 10,000 years, but suddenly in the last few decades our governments and law-makers have seen fit to not just ban them from human consumption, but to make them illegal and even imprison people who choose to use them."

Paul Mooney + Jim Jefferies FTW.

I miss The Green Room.

"Like if I was going to be raped, I'd want Bobby over Paul."

The best part is when Joe Rogan is talking about getting high and communicating with dolphins, and all Tommy Chong is doing is smiling and nodding.

New Life Goal.

Long-term Immersion in the DMT Realm Through Controlled Intravenous Injection | The Daily Grail: "Using pharmacokinetic modelling and DMT blood sampling data, we demonstrate that the unique pharmacological characteristics of DMT, which also include a rapid onset and lack of acute tolerance to its subjective effects, make it amenable to administration by target-controlled intravenous infusion."

"That is completely an ideology thing. She's on your 'team.' You're gonna go along with it."

Can't Stop the Signal: "Print Your Own Drugs." Welcome to the Future.

Reason.com: "The first commercially 3D-printed drug, the epilepsy medication SPRITAM, went on sale in March of this year. SPRITAM doesn't fulfill Cronin's promise of custom medications printed by patients—3D production in this case is used to create a rapidly disintegrating, easily swallowed pill—but it's a demonstration of the medical use of the technology earlier than most people expected to see anything of the sort. 

And even as SPRITAM prepared to go to market, "investigators from Wake Forest University, Columbia University and the University of North Carolina created a prototype computer algorithm featuring software for 3D printing of personalized medications" and successfully used it to print varying doses of pills. The software isn't yet ready to make an appearance at pharmacies, much less in people's homes, but it works now. That brings the goal of personalized medicine much closer to fruition, just a few years after Cronin invoked Star Trek. This "could very well change how we treat serious and common medical conditions, from epilepsy to chronic pain, on a patient-specific basis, making medications customizable and therefore cheaper, more accurate, and more effective than ever before," predicted 3Ders.org...

Holmes' reminder that any attempt to restrict the use of 3D printing is likely to be bypassed rings more true than Cronin's hopes for unhackable chemical ink and printers. Innovation has its own logic—its potential isn't so easily confined to the preferred parameters of its creators, let alone politicians and government bureaucrats. That should be apparent 17 years after Napster and its spawn revolutionized the enjoyment of music and film, three years after Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed 3D-printed a functioning firearm and pushed gun control laws toward futility, and at a moment when FBI officials throw public temper tantrums over encryption. As with every other exercise of creativity, 3D printing is changing the world in ways that the powers-that-be might or might not like. They'll have to adjust. But they may kick and scream a bit on the way. 

With SPRITAM on the market, lawyers and regulators are sweating bullets about what it all means—and their worries only start at kitchen-table ecstasy tablets, then range far beyond. Recently, the Dutch law firm De Clercq Advocaten Notarissen cautioned at length about the intellectual property and liability threats 3D printing poses to the current order, as well as the dangers of "printing of weapons, keys for police handcuffs, military material, medication or illegal drugs, or other undesirable products." At almost the same moment, Bloomberg BNA spoke with legal experts who warned that "the recent FDA approval of the first 3D printed drug could lead to several complicated legal, product liability and intellectual property conflicts that could derail the new technology before it even starts.""

Free Speech + Beer. Win-Win.

Flying Dog Brewery Wins First Amendment Battle, Uses Proceeds to Promote Free Speech - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "...Maryland's Flying Dog Brewery won in its battle with the Michigan Liquor Control Commission, after the agency tried to ban the sale of Flying Dog's delicious, Belgian-style IPA because of the brew's name: Raging Bitch. The liquor commission also objected to the beer label's artwork, designed by Ralph Steadman, best known for illustrating Hunter S. Thompson's books and articles.  

Flying Dog sued the commission in 2009, but the case didn't come to a close until last year, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit sided with the brewery, saying Michigan officials could be held liable for violating the brewery's First Amendment rights, and Flying Dog could pursue damages for lost sales during the ban. 

Now, Flying Dog has announced that it will use the damages received in that case to found the "1st Amendment Society," a non-profit dedicated to awareness-raising and advocacy around free-speech issues and organizing events that promote "the arts, journalism and civil liberties." 

"We don’t like ... arbitrary authoritarianism,” Flying Dog CEO Jim Caruso said in a lengthy Brightest Young Things profile about his company last August. "The market should decide. If they don’t like our beer or our names, they can choose not to buy it." 

He added: "We do believe that freedom of speech is the last defense against tyranny." In announcing the 1st Amendment Society's launch, Caruso said that the First Amendment "affects (and makes possible) all aspects of our lives, yet is consistently being threatened by the same democratic body that established it. It’s imperative that we continue this fight beyond the courtroom.""

Welcome to the future.

"Why does he say most people don't need treatment? Because... the vast majority of drug users aren't addicts. "

'Drug Users Need Treatment,' Says President Obama. Not So Fast, Says Dr. Carl Hart - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Why does he say most people don't need treatment? Because—contrary to widespread perceptions—the vast majority of drug users aren't addicts. 

"When I say drug abuse and drug addiction, I'm thinking of people whose psycho-social functioning is disrupted," he said later in the talk. But for more than three-quarters of drug users (and we're not just talking about marijuana here, either), that description doesn't apply. 

This overturns the conventional wisdom on drug addiction, but Hart thinks that's a good thing. We've all been fed a diet of panic-inducing misinformation about what drugs actually do to our brains, he says. Most of us were taught that drugs like cocaine are so addictive that a rat in a laboratory experiment will continue to press a lever to receive the substance—to the exclusion of all its other physical needs—until it actually dies.

Hart said at first even he believed that finding to be true. But it turns out, those studies weren't what they were cracked up to be. "When you have the rat in a cage alone, and there's nothing else for the rat to do, the rat will repeatedly choose to take cocaine," he said. "That's logical. If the only thing you had to do in your life was press a lever to receive cocaine, what are you doing? I hope you're pressing for the cocaine." But if additional stimuli are introduced to the environment, the finding completely falls apart. 

"When you enrich the rat's environment such that you provide something like a sweet drink, or a sexually receptive mate, or some other alternative, the rat doesn't repeatedly take cocaine," he explained. "In fact, it's difficult to get the rat to self-administer or press the lever to take cocaine if you provide the rat with food!"

When he tried to replicate the experiment with drug-addicted humans instead of rats, he found they too behaved logically, choosing, say, $20 in cash as opposed to a $10 hit of coke. "This 'hijacking' of the brain's reward system, that's a nice sexy metaphor," he said. "But what we said was that cocaine addicts could not inhibit certain types of responses. They could not delay gratification. They had cognitive impairment such that they couldn't engage in this long-term planning." Yet repeatedly in tests, they did. Once you realize that drugs don't actually rewire people's brains, making them unable to function, you can start to focus on things that matter more—like preventing overdoses. The way to do that, according to Hart, is through educational initiatives, not treatment programs."

"The CIA had investigated itself and cleared itself, and the press was happy to let things stay that way.”

Watched "Kill the Messenger" last weekend.  Good flick.  Had read "Dark Alliance" and a bunch on the San Jose Mercury News story years ago, during the time when it seemed like all I was reading was "conspiracy theory."  

[Oddly enough, my first "CIA runs drugs from South America" story I ever ran into was a late 80s Mike Grell run on Green Arrow, iirc.  Comics teach everything, really.]

Feeling under the weather earlier this week I spent a day or so catching up with the facts and players in the debacle, spiraling from Dark Alliance to Iran-Contra to the November Surprise, back around again to the Inslaw/PROMIS case and the other journalist "suicide" of Danny Casolaro.   Not to mention the Clinton's involvement in the Mena airport in Arkansas.  

Of note, "Mena" is a soon-to-be major motion picture released next year starring Tom Cruise as drug runner/pilot Barry Seal.  Didn't see that one coming.  What a dark, twisted, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass world.  Conspiracy "theories."  Right.  

Corrupt cops, shady politicians, CIA cutouts, foreign policy by black budget, media douchebaggery...  Nobody cares, nothing changes.   

Three great articles worth reading in full on the topic, if inclined.  The quick hits:

How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb: "Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” the CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter."

Dujmovic also pointed out that much of what was reported in “Dark Alliance” was not new. Indeed, in 1985, more than a decade before the series was published, Associated Press journalists Robert Parry and Brian Barger found that Contra groups had “engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua.” In a move that foreshadowed Webb’s experience, the Reagan White House launched “a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign to besmirch the professionalism of Parry and Barger and to discredit all reporting on the contras and drugs,” according to a 1997 article by Peter Kornbluh for the Columbia Journalism Review. “Whether the campaign was the cause or not, coverage was minimal.”

...newspapers like the Times and the Post seemed to spend far more time trying to poke holes in the series than in following up on the underreported scandal at its heart, the involvement of U.S.-backed proxy forces in international drug trafficking. The Los Angeles Times was especially aggressive. Scooped in its own backyard, the California paper assigned no fewer than 17 reporters to pick apart Webb’s reporting. While employees denied an outright effort to attack the Mercury News, one of the 17 referred to it as the “get Gary Webb team.” Another said at the time, “We’re going to take away that guy’s Pulitzer,” according to Kornbluh’s CJR piece. Within two months of the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the L.A. Times devoted more words to dismantling its competitor’s breakout hit than comprised the series itself...

The Washington Post proved particularly useful. “Because of the Post‘s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a ‘firestorm of reaction’ against the San Jose Mercury News.” Over the month that followed, critical media coverage of the series (“balanced reporting”) far outnumbered supportive stories, a trend the CIA credited to the Post, The New York Times, “and especially the Los Angeles Times.”

...In “Managing a Nightmare,” Dujmovic attributed the initial outcry over the “Dark Alliance” series to “societal shortcomings” that are not present in the spy agency. “As a personal post-script, I would submit that ultimately the CIA-drug story says a lot more about American society on the eve of the millennium that [sic] it does about either the CIA or the media,” he wrote. “We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times–when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community.”"

Webb obviously saw things differently. He reflected on his fall from grace in the 2002 book, Into the Buzzsaw. Prior to “Dark Alliance,” Webb said, “I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests.” “And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job,” Webb wrote. “The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.”"

THE  MIGHTY  WURLITZER  PLAYS  ON by Gary Webb Chapter 14 from In the Buzzsaw edited by Kristina Borjesson: "Over the course of three days, Dark Alliance advanced five main arguments:  First, that the CIA-created Contras had been selling cocaine to finance their activities.  This was something the CIA and the major media had dismissed or denied since the mid-1980s, when a few reporters first began writing about Contra drug dealing.  Second, that the Contras had sold cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles and that their main customer was L.A.'s biggest crack dealer.  Third, that elements of the U.S. government knew about this drug ring's activities at the time and did little if anything to stop it.  Fourth, that because of the time period and the areas in which it operated, this drug ring played a critical role in fueling and supplying the first mass crack cocaine market in the United States.  And fifth, that the profits earned from this crack market allowed the Los Angeles-based Crips and bloods to expand into other cities and spread crack use to other black urban areas, turning a bad local problem into a bad national problem.  This led to panicky federal drug laws that were locking up thousands of small-time, black crack dealers for years but never denting the crack trade. It wasn't so much a conspiracy that I had outlined as it was a chain-reaction--bad ideas compounded by stupid political decisions and rotten historical timing...

When the newspapers of record spoke, they spoke in unison.  Between October and November, the  Washington Post,  the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times published lengthy stories about the CIA drug issue, but spent precious little time exploring the CIA's activities.  Instead, my reporting and I became the focus of their scrutiny.  After looking into the issue for several weeks, the official conclusion reached by all three papers: Much ado about nothing.  No story here.  Nothing worth pursuing.  The series was "flawed," they contended.  How? 

Well, there was no evidence the CIA knew anything about it, according to unnamed CIA officials the newspapers spoke to.  The drug traffickers we identified as Contras didn't have "official" positions with the organization and didn't really give them all that much drug money.  This was according to another CIA agent, Adolfo Calero, the former head of the Contras, an the man whose picture we had just published on the Internet, huddled in a kitchen with one of the Contra drug traffickers.  Calero's apparent involvement with the drug operation was never mentioned by any of the papers; his decades-long relationship with the CIA was never mentioned either. Additionally, it was argues, this quasi-Contra drug ring was small potatoes.  One of the Contra traffickers had only sold five tons of cocaine during his entire career, the Washington Post sniffed, badly misquoting a DEA report we'd posted on the Web site.  According to the Post's analysis, written by a former CIA informant, Walter Pincus, who was then covering the CIA for the Post, this drug ring couldn't have made a difference in the crack market because five tons wasn't nearly enough to go around.  Eventually, those assertions would be refuted by internal records released by both the CIA and the Justice Department, but at the time they were classified...

When the CIA and Justice Department finished their internal investigations two years later, the classified documents that were released showed just how badly I had fucked up.  The CIA's knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I'd ever imagined.  The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed.  The involvement between the CIA agents running the Contras and the drug traffickers was closer than I had written.  And agents and officials of the DEA had protected the traffickers from arrest, something I'd not been allowed to print.  The CIA also admitted having direct involvement with about four dozen other drug traffickers or their companies, and that this too had been known and effectively condoned by the CIA's top brass.       

In fact, at the start of the Contra war, the CIA and Justice Department had worked out an unusual agreement that permitted the CIA not to have to report allegations of drug trafficking by its agents to the Justice Department.  It was a curious loophole in the law, to say the least. Despite those rather stunning admissions, the internal investigations were portrayed in the press as having uncovered no evidence of  CIA involvement in drug trafficking and no evidence of a conspiracy to send crack to black neighborhoods, which was hardly surprising since I had never said there was.  What I had written -- that individual CIA agents working within the Contras were deeply involved with this drug ring -- was either ignored or excised from the CIA's final reports.  

For instance, the agency's decade-long employment of two Contra commanders --Colonel Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero--was never mentioned in the declassified CIA reports, leaving the false impression that they had no CIA connection.  This was a critical omission, since Bermudez and Calero were identified in my series as the CIA agents who had directly involved with the Contra Drug pipeline.  Even though their relationship with the agency was a matter of public record, none of the press reports I saw celebrating the CIA's self-absolution bothered to address this gaping hole in the official story.  The CIA had investigated itself and cleared itself, and the press was happy to let things stay that way.  No independent investigation was done. The funny thing was, despite all the furor, the facts of the story never changed, except to become more damning.  But the perception of them did, and in this case, that is really all that mattered.  Once a story became "discredited," the rest of the media shied away from it.  Dark Alliance was consigned to the dustbin of history, viewed as an Internet conspiracy theory that had been thoroughly disproved by more responsible news organizations...

But what of the press?  Why did our free and independent media participate with the government's disinformation campaign?  

  ...as I discovered while researching the book I eventually wrote about this story, the national news organizations have had a long, disappointing history of playing footsie with the CIA, printing unsubstantiated agency leaks, giving agents journalistic cover, and downplaying or attacking stories and ideas damaging to the agency.  I can only speculate as to why this occurs, but I am not naive enough to believe it is mere coincidence. The scary thing about this collusion between the press and the powerful is that it works so well.  In this case, the government's denials and promises to pursue the truth didn't work.  The public didn't accept them, for obvious reasons, an the clamor for an independent investigation continued to grow.  But after the government's supposed watchdogs weighed in, public opinion  became divided and confused, the movement to force congressional hearings lost steam and, once enough people came to believe the stories were false or exaggerated, the issue could safely be put back at the bottom of the dead-story pile, hopefully never to rise again. 

Do we have a free press today?  Sure we do.  It's free to report all the sex scandals it wants, all the stock market news we can handle, every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens.  But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff -- stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking -- that's where we begin to see the limits of our freedoms.  In today's media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion. Back in 1938, when fascism was sweeping Europe, legendary investigative reporter George Seldes observed (in his book, The Lords of the Press) that "it is possible to fool all the people all the time -- when government and press cooperate."  Unfortunately, we have reached that point."

The Pariah: "Mike Holm did his hard stints in the Middle East, the Miami station, and Los Angeles, all for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, and he is determined that I face the reality he knows. So he starts again. He repeats, "When the Big Dog gets off the porch, watch out." And by the Big Dog, he means the full might of the United States government. At that moment, he continues, you play by Big Boy rules, and that means, he explains, that there are no rules but to complete the mission. We've gotten into all this schooling because I asked him about reports that he received when he was stationed in Miami that Southern Air Transport, a CIA-contracted airline, was landing planeloads of cocaine at Homestead Air Force Base nearby. Back in the eighties, Holm's informants kept telling him about these flights, and then he was told by his superiors to "stand down because of national security." And so he did. He is an honorable man who believes in his government, and he didn't ask why the flights were taking place; he simply obeyed. Because he has seen the Big Dog get off the porch, and he has tasted Big Boy rules. Besides, he tells me, these things are done right, and if you look into the matter, you'll find contract employees or guys associated with the CIA, but you won't find a CIA case officer on a loading dock tossing kilos of coke around. Any more than Mike Holm ever saw a plane loaded top to bottom with kilos of coke. He didn't have to. He believed his informants. And he believed in the skill and power of the CIA. And he believed in the sheer might and will of the Big Dog when he finally decides to get off the porch...

Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" broke an old story. The history of the CIA's relationship with international drug dealers has been documented and published, yet it is almost completely unknown to most citizens and reporters. Webb himself had only a dim notion of this record. And so he reacted with horror when the implications of his research first began to become clear to him: that while much of the federal government fought narcotics as a plague, the CIA, in pursuing its foreign-policy goals, sometimes facilitated the work of drug traffickers. "Dark Alliance" is surrounded by a public record that bristles with similar instances of CIA connections with drug people: — Alan Fiers, who headed the CIA Central American Task Force, testified during the Iran-contra hearings in August 1987, "With respect to [drug trafficking by] the resistance forces...it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people." — In 1983, fifty people, many of them Nicaraguans, were caught unloading a big coke shipment in San Francisco. A couple of them claimed involvement with the CIA, and after a meeting between CIA officials and the U.S. attorney handling the case, $36,000 found in a bedside table was returned because it "belonged to the contras." This spring, when the CIA published its censored report on involvement of the agency with drug traffickers in the contra war (a report that exists solely because a firestorm erupted in Congress after Webb's series), this incident was explained thusly: "Based upon the information available to them at the time, CIA personnel reached the erroneous conclusion that one of the two individuals...was a former CIA asset." Logically, an admission that CIA "assets" can sometimes be drug dealers...

Hector Berrellez wanted a criminal investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency. His $3 million snitch budget had brought in an unseemly harvest, report after report from informants that in the eighties CIA-leased aircraft were flying cocaine into places like the air-force base in Homestead, Florida, and the airfield north of Tucson long believed to be a CIA base. And that these planes were flying guns south. One of his witnesses in the Camarena case told him about flying in a U.S. military plane loaded with drugs from Guadalajara to Homestead. Other informants told him that major drug figures, including Rafael Caro Quintero, the man finally imprisoned for the Camarena murder, were getting guns delivered through CIA connections. Everywhere he turned, he ran into dope guys who had CIA connections, and to a narc this didn't look right. "I can't believe," he told his superiors, "that the CIA is handling all this shit and doesn't know what these pilots are doing." His superiors asked if he had hard evidence of actual CIA case officers moving dope, and he said no, just lots of people they employed. All intelligence services use the fabled "cutouts" to separate themselves from their grubby work...

In December 1995, Webb wrote out his project memo, and suddenly, "I realized what we were saying here. I'm sitting at home, and this e-mail comes from a friend at the Los Angeles Times. And I had told him vaguely about this interesting story I was working on. I told him that he had no idea what his fucking government is capable of. "And I was depressed because this was so horrible. It was like some guy told me that he had gone through the looking glass and was in this nether world that 99 percent of the American public would never believe existed. That's where I felt I was. When I sat down and wrote the project memo and said, Here's what we're going to say, and we're going to be accusing the government of bringing drugs into the country, essentially, and we've spent billions of dollars and locked up Americans for selling shit that the government helps to come into the country — is just...If you believe in democracy and you believe in justice, it's fucking awful.""

...Before he retired, Hector was summoned to Washington to brief Attorney General Janet Reno on Mexican corruption. He talked to her at length about how the very officials she was dealing with in Mexico had direct links to drug cartels. He remembers that she asked very few questions. Now he sits in the nice lounge of the nice hotel, and he believes the CIA is in the dope business; he believes the agency ran camps in Mexico for the contras, with big planes flying in and out full of dope. He now knows in his bones what the hell he really saw on October 27, 1986, when he hit the door of that house in the Los Angeles area and was greeted with politeness and fresh coffee. But he doesn't carry a smoking gun around. The photos, the ledgers, all the stuff the cops found that morning as they hit fourteen stash houses where all the occupants seemed to be expecting company, all that material went to Washington and seems to have vanished. All those reports he wrote for years while in Mexico and then later running the Camarena case, those detailed reports of how he kept stumbling into dope deals done by CIA assets, never produced any results or even a substantive response...

I can hear Hector Berrellez telling me that I will never find a smoking gun. I can hear the critics of Gary Webb explaining that all he has is circumstantial evidence. Like anyone who dips into the world of the CIA, I find myself questioning the plain facts I read and asking myself, Does this really mean what I think it means? — In 1982, the head of the CIA got a special exemption from the federal requirement to report dealings with drug traffickers. Why did the CIA need such an exemption? — Courthouse documents attest to the fact that the Blandón drug organization moved tons of dope for years with impunity, shipped millions to be laundered in Florida, and then bought arms for the contras. Why are Gary Webb's detractors not looking at these documents and others instead of bashing Webb over the head? — The internal CIA report of contra cocaine activity has never been released. The Justice Department investigation of Webb's charges has never been released. The CIA has released a censored report on only one volume of Webb's charges. The contra war is over, yet this material is kept secret. Why aren't the major newspapers filing Freedom of Information [Act] requests for these studies? — The fifty-year history of CIA involvement with heroin traffickers and other drug connections is restricted to academic studies and fringe publications...

Following the release of "Dark Alliance," Senator John Kerry told The Washington Post, "There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, on the payroll of, and carrying the credentials of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while involved in support of the contras." Why has the massive Kerry report been ignored to this day? — On March 16, 1998, the CIA inspector general, Frederick P. Hitz, testified before the House Intelligence Committee. "Let me be frank," he said. "There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations." Representative Norman Dicks of Washington then asked, "Did any of these allegations involve trafficking in the United States?" "Yes," Hitz answered. The question is why a mountain of evidence about the CIA and drugs is ignored and why the legitimate field of inquiry opened by Webb remains unpursued and has become journalistic taboo."

"The War on Drugs... was not done for any noble public purpose—it was a political gambit, nothing more."

Nixon Invented the Drug War to Decimate Hippies and Black People, Former Adviser Confesses - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs for one specific reason: to decimate his perceived political enemies—the anti-war left, and black people.  That's according to an anecdote in a lengthy cover story for Harper's, in which journalist Dan Baum recounts an interview he conducted with John Erlichman, a former Nixon staffer who was jailed for one year due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Unprompted, Erlichman confessed the true purpose of federal drug prohibition: 

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”"

Reading - Winter '15/16 - "When I cannot find contentment in myself, it is useless to seek it elsewhere."

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition by Robert B. Cialdini

Smuggler's Run: A Han Solo Adventure by Greg Rucka

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

Limitless: A Novel by Alan Glynn

In The Steps Of Bruce Lee: JKD Without Limits by Burton Richardson

COAN: The Man, The Myth, The Method: The Life, Times & Training of The Greatest Powerlifter of All-Time by Marty Gallagher

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki

The Choice by Og Mandino

EAT-FAT ∆ GET-FIT Essentials: Low Carb Wellness Made Easy by Ted Neckowicz
The Purposeful Primitive by Marty Gallagher

The Tithe Volume 1 by Matt Hawkins and Rahsan Ekedal

Empire: Uprising Volume 1 by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson

Uber Volume 4 & 5  by Kieron Gillen and Caanan White

Challengers of the Unknown Must Die! by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
Lazarus Volume 4: Poison Paperback by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark
Grayson Vol. 1: Agents Of Spyral & Vol. 2: We All Die at Dawn  by Tom King, Tim Seeley & Mikel Janin 

Excerpts:

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Reciprocity, Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Scarcity, Authority

The Choice 

"What must be shall be; and that which is a necessity to him that struggles is little more than choice to him that is willing." - Seneca

"So many of us spend our lives searching for happiness. Like children hunting for Easter eggs, we dash hither and yon hoping to discover some mystical bluebird. Life would be so different, we sigh, if only we were happy. And so, one hurries home to be happy and another flees home to be happy. One is getting married to be happy and another is getting divorced to be happy. One takes expensive cruises to be happy and another labors overtime to be happy. Endless search.  Wasted years.  Madness...  I choose a better way to live!  Henceforth, my pursuit of happiness has ended. How blind I have been! Now I know that happiness hides not in that new house, that new career, that new friend. And it is never for sale. When I cannot find contentment in myself, it is useless to seek it elsewhere. Whenever I depend on things outside myself to supply me with joy I am doomed to disappointment. Happiness, I see now, has nothing to do with getting. It consists of being satisfied with what I've got and what I haven't got.  Few things are necessary to make the wise man happy while no amount of material wealth would satisfy a fool. I am not a fool. I have drawn a circle around me. Whenever I reach across it I will be giving, not taking. My needs are few. So long as I have something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for, I shall be happy. Now I know that the only source of happiness is within me, and I will begin to share it."

"So many of us think ourselves into smallness, into inferiority, by thinking downward. We are held back by too much caution. We are timid about venturing. We are not bold enough. And so we die before we reach middle age, although we will not be lowered into the ground until we pass three score and ten. What happened to the grand dreams of our youth? Suicide. Struck down by our caution, our lack of faith in ourselves and our abilities. Opportunities? There are many. But always there was risk. Do we dare? We vacillate. Time hurries by. Opportunity gone. We anguish. The years roll on. Finally, we convince ourselves that it’s too late and settle for cheap imitations of life. We envy the achievers. How lucky they are. I choose a better way to live! Henceforth, I will take every risk and embrace every opportunity that may provide a better life for me and my family. I no longer believe that a rolling stone gathers no moss. Better to be in motion, even if the energy is wasted, than buried forever in a shady plot. That will come soon enough. I will despise myself later if I look back on my life and realize that I had the talent and the ability to do great things but could not find the courage to try. I know what I can do, and I know how little I have done. I have frittered away my opportunities like children at the seashore who fill their hands with sand and then let the grains all fall through their open fists. It is not too late for me. I can still fill my hands. I can still shape a future of success and happiness. I am capable of great wonders, and now I know that my achievements will never rise higher than my faith in myself. I have new faith. I was made in the image of God. I was not created to fail. Defeat? Possible. Quit? Never again!"

Smuggler's Run: A Han Solo Adventure 

“Thing about the galaxy, there’s as many versions of the truth as there are stars. Got an old friend who’s fond of saying that truth is greatly dependent on your point of view. Truth ain’t the same as fact, kid. You believe what you want to believe."

COAN: The Man, The Myth, The Method

"Art? Culture? In the face of the iron facts of biology such things are ridiculous, the exponents of such things only the more ridiculous." - Jack London

"We are all subject to the same biological facts-of-life. As it relates to weight training, this is both a blessing and a curse."

To succeed in powerlifting you need to be methodical. This is a learned mental trait. If you have a lazy mind-set, you will have lackadaisical training sessions yielding lame results. The second variety of mind power is the ability to psyche yourself up for an all-out effort. This is a learned mental attitude that improves with repeated practice.

Killing Rommel

In my experience, valor in action counts for far less than simply performing one’s commonplace task without cocking it up. This is by no means as simple as it sounds.

The role of the officer, in my experience, is nothing grander than to stand sentinel over himself and his men, towards the end of keeping them from forgetting who they are and what their objective is, how to get there, and what equipment they’re supposed to have when they arrive. Oh, and getting back. That’s the tricky part.

Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman’s complaint lies not with his circumstances, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with the injust of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Money doesn’t help. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That’s why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them.

You've been taught as an officer never to pretend to know something you don't.   Now I'll give you a corollary: never try to make up for one mistake by committing a greater one.

With this, I understand the perverse logic of war and the true tragedy of armed conflict. The enemy against whom we fight are human beings like ourselves, individuals with whom each of us might have been friends except for the deranged fictions of nation, doctrine, race and religion, and whom now we must murder (as they seek to murder us) in the name of those very same fictions. And yet, knowing all this and understanding it, still, in some depraved and ineluctable way, we and they must live it out to the bloody finish.

Limitless

Why should data cluster in predictable patterns? Why should there be a structure to the financial markets?’ I paused, waiting for someone to say something, but when no one did I went on, ‘because the markets are the product of human activity, and humans follow trends – it’s that simple.’ Kevin had gone pale by this stage. ‘And of course the trends are usually the same … one, aversion to risk, and two, follow the herd.’   

Because any time I’d thought of her over the past ten years, the person I’d automatically visualized had been the thin shiny Melissa of circa 1988, the one with long black hair and prominent cheekbones...  But the Melissa of those days, apparently, had unravelled in time and space and was a ghost now. I was never going to see her again, never going to bump into her in the street. She’d been supplanted by the Melissa I hadn’t kept up with, the one who’d gotten married again and had kids, who’d worked for Iroquois magazine, the one who’d allowed her teeming, tumultuous brain to be damaged, and permanently so, by some untried, untested and previously unknown pharmaceutical product...

The Purposeful Primitive

Hugh would tell us when we complained of tiredness to fire down more calories. “Eat your way through sticking points!” He’d say. If the poundage was feeling heavy on Saturday weighing 216, push your bodyweight to 220 by Wednesday and make those weights seem light. This was a man-killer approach: train till you begin hallucinating, eat tons of food, drink four quarts or more of milk daily then rest until the 2nd weekly slaughter fest. This approach worked wonders for aggressive young men intent on becoming massively muscled competitive powerlifters.

If you scrape away all the different rationale and reasons people engage in fitness-related activities, the bottom line is that they want to modify their physique, change their body from what it is into what they want it to be. Being dissatisfied with their physical status quo, they will rearrange their lives and devote time, money and effort towards triggering transformation.

People who successfully transform physically transform psychologically.

Ori Hofmekler says, “Life in paradise should be rugged!” We are primordially programmed for struggle yet we seek to avoid struggle at all cost. Struggle is the precursor to true transformation: without struggle there is no transformation.

Basic barbell and dumbbell exercises done with incredible intensity then backed up with lots of calories result in the construction of new muscle. If you are selective about the ample calories you eat, if you practice periodic cardiovascular exercise, stored body fat is mobilized and oxidized. If eating and training are perfectly attuned to one another, synergy takes hold and results are dramatically accelerated.

True physical renovation requires that we seek the path of maximum resistance, both figuratively and literally.

Physical transformation is all about struggle and effort.

Most trainees are genuinely unaware of the sheer physical effort required to trigger tangible results. No one has ever taken them aside and said, “Look—unless you really extend yourself—I mean REALLY extend yourself—unless you press the effort accelerator to the floorboard, unless you take it to the limit and beyond, consistently and repeatedly—nothing of any real physical significance is going to occur. Capacity is a Shifting Target If you train with the requisite effort, you can’t go very long. If you can, you’re not going hard enough. Going through the motions, i.e., using the same poundage in the same exercises for the same number of sets and same number of repetitions, week after week, doing the same things in the same ways, is going to net zero results. Only by pushing the body past current capacity, only through dogged struggle, only by attempting to equal or exceed your previous best, will anything of muscular significance occur.

The human body does not favorably reconfigure itself in response to ease and sameness. The body only grows new muscle and becomes stronger when pushed into new territory. Those who go through the motions (staying within their comfort zone) can train for a long time. Those who train intensely enough to trigger hypertrophy have between 30 and 75 minutes before the sheer intensity of the effort causes them to run out of energy. Super hard and super heavy training drains physical energy and also drains psychic energy. Only the trained, experienced individual, a member of the athletic elite, can train hard longer than an hour.

When you have a larger frame of physiological and psychological reference, you come to understand that by striving, by continually and unrelentingly pushing yourself in order to keep apace with your betters, you improve—or you break down, physically or psychologically. A good training partner has a responsibility to himself and to his partners. You are required to show up on time at the designated training venue, ready, willing and able to blast the living dog-shit out of some muscle, lift or body part.

Better To Use a Lousy System with Great Intensity Than A Sophisticated System Halfheartedly

Easier is not better in resistance training.

Initially, beneficial changes are legislated through willpower. However, all acts of willpower must cease at some point. Eventually you want genuine enthusiasm to take over from willpower. When enthusiasm powers the psychological process, chances of success radically improve. Willpower is a finite mental propellant. Once you burn through your quota, it takes a long time to restock. Enthusiasm is infinite. It replenishes itself.

Human nature loves to repeat pleasurable experience and if hard, intense, endorphin-releasing training is perceived as pleasurable, the Mind will seek to repeat this pleasurable experience. The more you train the better the gains, the better the gains the more you train…round and round it goes.

Disciplined eating is a psychological horse of a different color. It is far more difficult to become enthused about legislated eating. No endorphin-releasing pleasures, no training partners, no mathematical sense of accomplishment…eating requires the modification of conditioning and overcoming habit force. In our approach, proper nutrition is arrived at through the principle of creeping incrementalism. Tiny steps are taken, nutritionally speaking, using a wide range of foods and the end result is that the individual morphs detrimental eating habits into beneficial habits—new habits replace old ones—some through sheer trickery.

In the world of eating Taste is King. To pretend taste doesn’t matter or that it can be overcome through suppression or by some massive act of willpower is naïve, simplistic and doomed to failure.

Look for ways to make exercise fun. Certain physical activities are genuinely fun, but you need to make an effort to find them. Weight training can be quite enjoyable, particularly when planning is used. Half our brain is rational and logical and quite masculine while the other half of the brain is intuitive and spontaneous, artistic and feminine. A wonderful physical feeling descends and envelops the trainee after a properly aggressive progressive resistance workout. A state of physical well-being is brought on by the pure physical effort exerted.

Baby workouts, going through the motions, are insufficient to release endorphins and insufficient to trigger muscular hypertrophy.

The Mind can be our most powerful ally in our effort to reconfigure our physiques. Have the rational side of the brain design a plan of attack and let the intuitive side take over during the actual workout.

Concentration increases in direct proportion to the decease of internal chatter.

Can you take athletic efforts seriously enough to make changes in how you conduct yourself during the workout? Once you are able to develop real focus and concentration, performance skyrockets. Improved results equate to more muscle mass and less body fat.

We cannot gorge for years (or decades) on artificial, processed, highly refined foods containing noxious elements, without consequence. If fed a continual diet of food garbage, over time we destroy ourselves...

As long as we view dieting as an odious task of self-denial, a repugnant and extended exercise in stressful willpower, we will never turn the corner. Tangible results generate genuine enthusiasm for the process. When exercise becomes enjoyable and dieting becomes effortless, enthusiasm has supplanted willpower. Enthusiasm is an infinite mental propellant and can propel the process indefinitely.

#TheStruggle