Today's Internets.

Lesism - by Les Floyd: Disidentifying From Depression: "The more we attach ourselves to the idea (i.e. the dysfunctional thought) that we are in some way ‘faulty’, the more we galvanise that notion, within. It becomes a form of self-discrimination, perpetuating the ego’s perceived control over us, and the more we feed our ego, the tougher it is to break the cycle of critical over-thinking, which is the source of emotional anxiety and pain."

Lesism - by Les Floyd: The Weight of the World: "I used to worry about everything I could find to worry about. I’d actively hunt down subject matter that would help me wallow in that fear, such as watching footage of the Asian Tsunami or the World Trade Centre atrocity. I’d consider what it must have been like to be on the beach and see that tremendous wave coming, or to feel the floor beneath my feet give way in those towers, visualising myself utterly powerless to prevent my imminent doom and demise. Did my grim empathy do anyone any good? Did it force time to rewind and allow me to save lives? Did it comfort the survivors or the families of the dead? No, all it did was help exacerbate the depressive, negative swirl of thought in my mind, further deepening the darkness of my perception of life. This process of thought was no use at all, to anyone. Quite the opposite: it caused mental torment within myself and that negative energy would have spread to the people around me, either through my communication with them, or because of my general sullen demeanour.

...If you’re worried about the world, the most positive thing you can do, today, is to clear up your inner-environment – i.e. yourself – and make it a calmer and more peaceful place to live. Once you’ve mastered that, you’ll radiate positive energy to those around you. Be kind to those you love (and even to those you don’t), make them smile when you have the chance and do what you can to help, when they need it (which isn’t necessarily when you think they need it)."

Are we in the end times of trust in government?: "...as bad things are, there is a tendency to assume that the current attitude toward the federal government is sort of how it always has been. Except that it hasn’t always been like that."

Hooray! - Mixing Alcohol With Diet Soda May Make You Drunker : The Salt : NPR: "Looking to cut back on the calories in your cocktail by mixing, say, diet soda and rum? Well, get ready for the buzz. According to the results of a new study, this combination will leave you drunker than if you'd mixed the liquor with a sugary, caloric mixer. "Alcohol, consumed with a diet mixer, results in higher (BrAC) Breath Alcohol Concentrations as compared to the same amount of alcohol consumed with a sugar-sweetened mixer," says Cecile Marczinski, a cognitive psychologist who authored the new study."

Texts From Last Night: "(603): trying to figure out what happened last night by looking around the apartment. 

(603): naked man under the piano. THE PLOT THICKENS."

FML: "Today, my husband started a conversation with, "In Pokémon" and ended the same conversation with "and that's why we should divorce." FML"

Texts From Last Night: "(989): Lets go hit some boners bro! 
(1-989): I appreciate the acceptance and inclusion, but that's not how we gay men talk."

best of craigslist: Vasectomy: $400. Speechless look on her face: priceless.: "I'll try to sum up a funny story that happened a few years ago: I got a vasectomy. I met a girl soon afterwards. She was nice and attractive but with a selfish streak that raised a big red flag. She was 32 at the time and I could practically HEAR her biological clock ticking...

Four months into dating, I get the "I'm pregnant" talk. She's going on and on about how the condom must have broke and now we really need to think about getting married "for the baby". She's positively giddy. She has a baby in her and she thinks she's gonna have a good meal ticket (me) to go along with her new 7lb annuity. 

At this point, I'm just as giddy. I get to pull the reverse "oops" on her. I figured that she slept with some bad boy and got knocked up. Good thing I was using condoms! Better still that I have a serious mistrust of women who can't think beyond their own uteri. 

So I wait a couple of days to "think about all this." I meet her again. I say I don't want kids and that she should have an abortion. I know where this is going and sure enough it goes there. She goes completely batshit insane on me. There were the usual insults about my manhood. There were threats of legal action. It was all very ugly and I was loving every minute of it. 

Well, I let her stew for a few days. She leaves me nasty messages on my phone. She sends awful emails. I'm laughing hysterically. 

...I ask her the $64,000 question. "Are you sure that this baby is mine?" 

Well, she goes batshit insane again. Hell, she ought to. Her plan could completely unravel if there is ANY question about my paternity. Oh, she's really screaming now. How dare I question her morals. Do I think she's a slut. I'm just trying to weasel out of my responsibilities... blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda. 

I'm not really mad. I'm kind of embarrassed for her. But since she won't shut up and the neighbors can hear all of this, I ask her to step back inside and sit down. She sits on the sofa and calms down a bit. She is glaring at me with all the moral self-righteousness that only a woman can muster up. She thinks she has me trapped. She is 100% convinced her plan has worked. Oh, the tangled web of lies and deceit she has wrought around herself...

I tell her simply, "You're screwed". 

Her look doesn't change. There is no way she can fathom what I have prepared. 

I continue. "I am sterile" 

Her look changes just a bit. Something is beginning to sink in. Naturally, she reverts to women's logic. "You're full of shit. You're trapped and you know it." 

I hold up the letter and the test results. "Three months before we met, I had a vasectomy. Here is a notarized letter from him stating what I had done. Here are two test results showing that I tested negative for the presence of sperm. Blanks. I am shooting blanks. That baby inside you is simply not mine." 

This woman is not to be swayed by logic and clear documentation. "Bullshit, those are fakes." 

I was ready for that. "No, they are real. This last piece of paper is from my attorney. It's a simple letter to you that states if you pursue any kind of legal action against me for child support that I will insist on a DNA test to prove paternity, that is, to prove that your baby is not mine." 

I give the woman all the documents. She reads them slowly, deliberately. With each passing second she can feel in her soul that she has made a very bad mistake. With denial swept away, she started to cry. It's a small cry at first. Then it becomes deeper and more painful. By the time she gets to the letter from the lawyer she is sobbing. 

I had no sympathy for her. I turned and walked out the door. Even after I closed the door I could still hear her sobbing. 

Epilogue - 

I never heard directly from this woman again. I did hear through my friends that she did indeed have the baby. I also heard that the real father was some guy in a band she had met. I assumed that after 30, women stopped going after musicians, bikers, criminals, and thugs. Silly me..."

 

These are Awesome.  Via JL8: A Webcomic

Training.

2/6 - P90X+ D80 Total Body+ -- burpees 8/2x6/2x5/8

Bodybuilding.com - We 'Mirin Vol. 21: 17 Bodies You Have To See:

Today's Internets.

Are You An Addict?: "I am an addict and my addiction has been going on for years.  I spend a lot of my day thinking about this addiction and will sacrifice almost anything to get it.  In just a day or two going without it, I experience withdrawal symptoms that can only be remedied when I have another fix.  Even after that fix, however, I am almost immediately consumed by thoughts of how I can have more.  I constantly crave and even dream about my addiction.  When I am unable to satisfy my habit, I feel irritable and become uncomfortable to be around.  Many people around me don’t understand why I act and do the things that I do on a daily basis as a result of my addiction.  To them, I am a real junkie.  My addiction has removed people from my life and brought other characters that share my vice into it.  I don’t really think I am doing anything wrong and although people have tried to make or convince me, this is not something I plan on ever giving up.  I don’t want anyone’s help and am not looking for recovery…  You see, I am addicted to positive self development through physical training."

Interesting.

Don’t Believe The Lies About Foreign Brides: "Next up is the Centre for Immigration Studies who again state a 20% divorce rate with mail order bride marriages. A separate organisation comes to the same conclusions the Immigration Department did, focusing on statistics gathered from foreign countries and agencies as they try to build a picture. Again, we see the same statistic: 80% of the marriages have been successful."

Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice."

Death by Loophole - By Rosa Brooks | Foreign Policy: "If you were worried about whether it was okay for the U.S. government to secretly kill an American citizen overseas, you can relax: The Justice Department says such killings are hunky dory, as long as some "informed, high-level official" decides that citizen poses an "imminent threat" and capture would be "unfeasible." Like many legal documents, this one does fine on its own terms, but looks a lot less satisfying when taken out of its hermetically sealed legal universe. In other words, it's all tree, no forest -- and it nicely illustrates the fact that "legality" is not the same as morality or common sense. 

...here's the problem. This isn't World War II. When the "enemy" (not just a few of the enemy, but all of the enemy) wears no uniform and appears on no traditional battlefield -- when there's substantial disagreement about what it means to be a "combatant," a "belligerent," or to "participate in hostilities" -- stating the legal principle that even U.S. citizens can be targeted if they join the enemy in a war against the United States tells us nothing whatsoever. It restates a legal truism, without offering any criteria for determining who's an enemy beyond stating that U.S. citizens who are "senior operational leaders of Al Qaeda and its associated forces" are targetable anywhere on the globe. But what's a "senior operational leader"? How is that defined? How many "senior operational leaders" are out there? And what's an "associated force" of al Qaeda? That's not defined either. For that matter, no criteria are offered for determining whether or not there's an armed conflict in the first place. Is the United States in an armed conflict with, for instance, al Shabaab in Somalia? Is al Shabaab an "associated force" of al Qaeda? 

...what constitutes an "imminent" threat? Traditionally, both international law and domestic criminal law understand that term narrowly: to be "imminent," a threat cannot be distant or speculative. To the Justice Department, however, "distant and speculative" are apparently perfectly consistent with "imminent": According to the white paper, the requirement of imminence "does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.""

Sex and Punishment: Eric Berkowitz Talks 4,000 Years of Judging Desire - Reason.com: "Eric Berkowitz, author of Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire. "After we ate the apple and did what we did, the sex organs to Augustine became like little dictators that we have to either succumb to or overpower."  ReasonTV's Tracy Oppenheimer sat down with Berkowitz to discuss original sin, trends in sex laws, and societies' perceptions of sexual transgressions."

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Coming Out of the Locker Room Ghetto: "Some questioned why a man my age would watch a show about girls in their twenties, as if they'd just discovered me hanging around a school playground with a shopping bag full of candy in one hand a fluffy puppy in the other. Of course, these critics are right. When I read Moby Dick I first had to convince the bookseller that I was a former whaler named Queequeg. When I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath, I had to pretend I was a depressed white woman with daddy issues. Don't worry, I used a fake ID."

Training.

2/5 - P90X+ D79 Plyometrics -- burpees 2x17/4 -- pullups x16, wg pullups 2x5, chinups 8/7/2x5, dips 15/10, band pull aparts/dislocates superset 2x10

2/4 - P90X+ D78 Upper+ & Abs/Core+ -- shrugs superset inverted/band 2x20 -- burpees x10/3x6/2x5

53 years old/NO EXCUSES - Bodybuilding.com - Over 40 Amateur Of The Week: Down To The Core:

Louis C.K. was awesome.

"Of course... but, maybe..." is made of winning awesome.

Louis C.K. in pitch-perfect, standup form at City Center - NYPOST.com: "His closing routine, which he dubs “Of course . . . but maybe,” is an instant classic. It begins with an innocuous statement, such as the Make a Wish Foundation for terminally ill children being a wonderful thing. Then, after a perfectly timed pause, he adds, “But maybe, maybe, giving a beautiful memory to a kid who’s gonna be dead in a week is a waste of time.” He makes us utterly complicit in his wickedness even as we can’t stop laughing."

Today's Internets.

Rather on point - The Hulk is Ally Sheedy in this Avengers/Breakfast Club mash-up video:

Someone Just Leaked Obama's Rules for Assassinating American Citizens - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "While the White House continues to deny that such memos exist, NBC is reporting that it has acquired the next best thing: A secretish 16-page white paper from the Department of Justice that was provided to select members of the Senate last June."

5 Disturbing Aspects of the DOJ White Paper on the President's License to Kill - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Japan’s suicide statistics don’t tell the real story | The Japan Times

Awesome - "No Asians" - cornering a racist turns out unexpectedly well - Boing Boing:

Report: More Than 50 Countries Involved in CIA Torture Program - Reason 24/7 : Reason.com: "More than 50 countries have been implicated in kidnapping, detention, and torture as part of the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition programs, said the Open Society Justice Initiative today in a report that provides the most comprehensive documentation to date of the human rights abuses associated with the intelligence agency’s post-September 11, 2001, counterterror operations."

Necrophilia Variations - Thoughts on 'Hysterical Literature': "Photographer Clayton Cubitt has begun a video series called "Hysterical Literature" in which he films women reading from a book while something happens out of sight beneath the table at which they're seated. For the first installment, the divine Stoya chose to read an excerpt from Necrophilia Variations while she was being masturbated by a conspicuously effective Hitachi vibrator... The concept is pure genius, a demented equivalent of the experiments sex researchers undertake in MRI laboratories as they scan the brain at the moment of orgasm. It sets up a conflict — mind vs body, more or less — and dramatizes it in Stoya's physiognomy..."  

Watch Here.

I liked this a lot.  Subversive.

GI Joe: Retaliation Viral Video Subverts Military Recruitment Ads - Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movies and TV News and Rumors: "The only real difference between this recruitment video for Cobra and one for any other military force is the name of the organisation.

Why Police Officers Lie Under Oath - NYTimes.com: "In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so. That may sound harsh, but numerous law enforcement officials have put the matter more bluntly.  Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner, wrote an article in The San Francisco Chronicle decrying a police culture that treats lying as the norm: “Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.” The New York City Police Department is not exempt from this critique."

Food Log.

1/28 - coffee, half & half, water, Monster Amino, Monster Pump, Monster Multi, Monster Milk, eggs, bacon, hamburger

1/29 - coffee, half & half, water, beef, eggs, bacon, Monster Milk

1/30 - coffee, half & half, water, Monster Amino, Monster Pump, Monster Multi, Monster Milk, eggs, bacon, hamburger

1/31 - eggs, bacon, coffee, half & half, water, turkey breast deli meat

2/1 - coffee, half & half, water, Monster Amino, Monster Pump, Monster Multi, Monster Milk, wine, cocktails, scallops, beef carpaccio, cauliflower, potatoes

2/2 - coffee, half & half, water, beef, mayo, wasabi, avocado, shredded cheese

2/3 - coffee, half & half, water, pizza, beer, Diet Coke

Today's Internets.

Front Toward Enemy: "Bogart and Bacall lead actors in Washington protesting the communist scare black list."

Karen De Coster » Intellectual Property Decrees Are Good For the Children: "The Washington Post reports that the Prince George County Board of Education can own your child’s ideas. A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual."

My favorite SuperBowl Ad...  

"Don't fret me bruddah.  Sticky bun come soon."

Missed this yesterday, but it's pretty funny...

And ya gotta like the Rock.

Community's finally back this week.  And escapades are, in fact, a grey area.

Training.

2/3 - P90X+ D77 Yoga X -- 60m Yin Yoga Spinal Series -- burpees 3x10/1x8

Motivation Is Easy: "There is only one foolproof method that I know of to motivate you to achieve your physical fitness goals in a consistent and hardcore manner, unless it is raining out: More caffeine. Sorry, "diet gurus" and Good Morning America "Seven Minute Ab" bullshit-of-the-month specialists with telegenic faces—motivation is not some Stuart Smalley self-affirmation bullshit that Sally Jesse Raphael's favorite life coach is only too happy to sell you for three easy payments of $19.95. Motivation is more caffeine. "Oh, I can't get up early enough in the morning to go to the gym, I'm so tired." Really? More caffeine. "Oh, after work I don't feel like going to the gym, I just want to 'veg out' on my sectional sofa." Really? More caffeine. "Oh, I already went to the gym once today, I think that's plenty." Really? Have you tried taking a nap to rest your weary muscles momentarily in preparation for Round Two—and more caffeine?"

Today's Internets.

White House Warns: Don't Photoshop Obama Gun Pic: ""This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.""

The Internets Responds Thusly: