""Hit me" said the masochist. "No" said the sadist."

The only time reality TV has done anything useful - Parts of Anti-Polygamy Law in Utah Ruled Unconstitutional by Federal Judge - Hit & Run : Reason.com: 

"A federal judge with the US District Court in Utah ruled portions of the state’s anti-polygamy law unconstitutional, effectively decriminalizing the practice of polygamous cohabitation...

"The case was brought to court by Kody Brown, who is married, lives with, and has children with four wives, and whose family is featured in TLC’s Sister Wives. Most polygamists’ lifestyles are not as public as the Browns’, so the issue may not have come to a head absent the reality show...

"While child brides, abuse, and other problematic activities should be dealt with and appropriately prosecuted, consenting adults in a plural relationship should not be threatened with punitive action. Judge Waddoups' ruling will help integrate these communities into society so that when abuse does occur, it will be more willingly reported and investigated.""

Fred On Everything: 

"I encounter a sententious suit-and-tie federal civil-serpent from NSA saying the Edward Snowden has endangered the national security of the United States, eeeek. At this, I shuddered and began mentally designing a bomb shelter.   But then I wondered how, precisely, are Americans now endangered? Is there a massed invasion fleet of Arab swordsmen poised to devastate North Carolina, and we need to read their tactical codes? I pictured Winston-Salem savaged by scimitar-wielding, hashish-smoking maniacs on weird double-humped camels. These be parlous times, methought. Or are Yemeni nuclear forces readying a first strike? Maybe this was the problem. As delivery systems they could use FedEx and UPS. Or maybe Snowden just embarrassed the children in the tree-house at Fort Meade, where everybody has a Captain America secret decoder ring.

Next, I see that some wet-lipped psychopath piloting a drone has killed fifteen people at a Yemeni wedding. Drones seem to hit a lot of weddings.  These massacres, I suppose, are the result of letting little boys play Grand Theft Auto. I pictured an Air Force of trigger-happy eleven-year-olds in arrested development. However, I concede that targeting weddings does make military sense: I have been to many weddings, and they all looked like Al Quaeda convoys. It’s just how weddings are...

But why, it occurred to me, should we expect the Pentagon to win wars? It has nothing to gain by winning, and everything to lose. From a budgetary point of view, victory would be as bad as defeat. In either case, contracts would slow."

Getting your head around the Pentagon's titanic, enormous, unauditably large budget - Boing Boing: "America's military owns more than 170 golf courses and manages enough land to host 93 Los Angeleses, and the Afghan/Iraq invasions have no meaningful peace dividend -- they're a permanent upward ratchet on the military budget."

Eat more butter, have less heart attacks - The Real Association Between Butter and Heart Disease in Sweden | DietDoctor.com: 

"The outdated fear-mongering propaganda claiming that a dramatically increased butter consumption in Sweden has also increased the incidence of heart disease is once again crushed by reality. New statistics from The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare show the exact opposite. The incidence of heart attacks in Sweden keeps plummeting, for both men and women, just as they have done since 2005. We are becoming healthier, despite eating more and more butter."

 

Better than the friendzone, for sure.

 

 

Food Log.

12/9 - coffee, cream, water, Animal Rage, Iron Mass, eggs, bacon -- Free Meal - ISAO sushi blowout, beer, sake

12/10 - coffee, cream, water, Animal Rage, Iron Mass, eggs, coconut oil, pork

12/11 - coffee, cream, water, Iron Mass, eggs, coconut oil, Animal Pak, Animal Flex, Animal Omega, HCL, turkey, mayo, cheddar cheese

12/12 - coffee, cream, water, Animal Rage, eggs, Iron Mass, steak, bacon, sour cream

12/13 - coffee, cream, water, Animal Rage, eggs, Iron Mass, Animal Pak, Animal Flex, Animal Omega, HCL, steak, bacon, avocado

12/14 - coffee, cream, water, eggs, steak, pork, cheddar cheese, sour cream

12/15 - coffee, cream, water, eggs, bacon, ham, latte, tomato, chicken, lettuce, spinach, avocado, blue cheese, cheddar

"I heard on NPR that Jesus was probably gay."

Corporate news is the propaganda arm of authoritarianism - NYT and ABC News lied about CIA operative - Boing Boing: 

"Since 2007, ABC News and the New York Times have known that ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson, missing in Iran, was spying there for the CIA. Since then, however, they've repeatedly lied about the purpose of his trip.

In an extraordinary breach of the most basic CIA rules, a team of analysts — with no authority to run spy operations — paid Levinson to gather intelligence from some of the world's darkest corners. He vanished while investigating the Iranian government for the U.S."

Batman & Robin seem different.  Better somehow.

Very much this - Hawaiian libertarian: For the Children: 

""The best thing for a child is for their parents to be happy. That doesn't necessarily mean they should be together." 

...This quote "The best thing for a child is for their parents to be happy..." is one of the biggest loads of bullshit ever propagated by our regularly scheduled mass media programming. At it's root, this pervasive meme is based on myopic, narcissistic selfishness, and is steroids for both male and female rationalization hamsters everywhere. It is one of the most pervasive and destructive memes, and is the single most influential whisper promulgated to effect the widespread destruction of families in order to shape our Brave New World Order's primary cultural paradigm. It is a primary contributor to the manufacturing of a populace weakened, damaged and dysfunctional, making them much easier to manipulate and control. Nothing creates the damaged psyche of easily manipulated and controlled people better than a family broken apart by a bitter, acrimonious divorce while the children involved are at a young age...

The entire rotten, crumbling edifice of what was once a civilized society, can be pinpointed on the promotion of leading people to think that the key to happiness is to focus on satisfying any and all of their selfish desires. In even simpler terms, it is a message influencing people to adopt a mindset focused on taking and receiving, and not giving and sharing...

This focus on selfishness is the very anti-thesis of true love. That's because what most people think of as "LOVE" is nothing more than a feeling. Something you "experience." An abstraction. You'll know it when you feel it. And, oh  yeah, without love, you cannot be happy. This is a corruption of what love really is. Love is not an abstract noun...an ephemeral feeling. An experience like an intoxicating drug that is somehow sold to us as THE key to human beings achieving  perpetual bliss. Nope. Love is a verb. You can only receive true love by doing it yourself to people worthy of it...by loving people who will love you back. It cannot be forced, nor can it be something you do expecting it in return...

When Betty Friedan and her ilk spread their incredibly corrosive propaganda that a stay at home mother cooking and cleaning for her husband and her kids was a "slave" in a "comfortable concentration camp," she basically brainwashed generations of women that loving their families was slavery. That the key to "happiness" was to "love yourself first." This damnable lie has led millions of people into true slavery...enslavement to materialistic consumerism. That by "loving yourself" you can "have it all."

...The best thing for a child -- or children -- is to have a Father and Mother who love each other. If they're fighting incessantly and constantly, and talking about divorce because it would be better for the kids to have two separated, but "happy" parents...chances are one or both of them are unhappy because they are not loving the other, but focused on "loving" themselves...

Ask not what your family can do for you, ask what you can do for your family. THAT is the best thing you can do for the children...not getting a divorce and destroying your child's family because you're  unhaaaaaaapppppyy focused on your own selfishness."

Real Women Don't Need to Wear the Pants by YourMojoByJojo on deviantART: 
"This Photograph was shot in studio by Jo Arellanes and assisted by Eric Ward and Dru Phillips. Hair and make up by Thomas Gaddis. Characters "Superman" and "Wonder Woman" are the trademarked property of DC Comics. The Cosplayers featured in this image are Danny Kelley and Margie Vizcarra Cox."

I don't care, that's funny.

"Beyond the Darkest Timeline."

I came, I saw, I conquered.: 

"Seth Rogen, girlfriend of the year award."

 

Fascinating.  First read this idea years ago in Michael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe" - Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram : Nature News

And then there's this.

Lobotomy For World War II Veterans: Psychiatric Care by U.S. Government - WSJ.com: 

"The VA’s use of lobotomy, in which doctors severed connections between parts of the brain then thought to control emotions, was known in medical circles in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and is occasionally cited in medical texts. But the VA’s practice, never widely publicized, long ago slipped from public view. Even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says it possesses no records detailing the creation and breadth of its lobotomy program.

Between April 1, 1947, and Sept. 30, 1950, VA doctors lobotomized 1,464 veterans at 50 hospitals authorized to perform the surgery, according to agency documents rediscovered by the Journal. Scores of records from 22 of those hospitals list another 466 lobotomies performed outside that time period, bringing the total documented operations to 1,930. Gaps in the records suggest that hundreds of additional operations likely took place at other VA facilities. The vast majority of the patients were men, although some female veterans underwent VA lobotomies, as well...

The VA documents subvert an article of faith of postwar American mythology: That returning soldiers put down their guns, shed their uniforms and stoically forged ahead into the optimistic 1950s...

Tan lines Final by Stephen-Daymond on deviantART:

What a horrible person - The Most Abominable Christian Wife On The Internet: 

"Jenny Erikson, a conservative Christian mommy blogger, recently attracted attention when she posted posted an attack on her pastor for “spoiling the surprise” of her divorce by telling her husband before she could...

You’ll notice most of her posts end with some version of “that happened” or “That. Just. Happened” as if she is deeply surprised that her actions have consequences and there are other people in the world who don’t share her narcissistic fantasy, in which God thinks exactly like her and agrees with every decision she makes. Her substitution of indignant phrases for counter argument shows an inability to imagine or empathize with a perspective other than her own.

[from the comments]

How dare you insult this fine Christian woman! All she did was divorce her husband, destroy her marriage , put herself and her happiness before her family, wrecked her children's lives, betrayed her faith, involved the court in her marriage , and left her husband because she was not happy and posted it all on the Internet under her real name so he is shamed worldwide forever. Obviously the pastor is the problem here. That. Is. Right. Because. I. Say. So."

The always funny Martin Freeman on how The Hobbit was really made: "Cocaine."

May the odds be ever in your favor.

Ron Swanson is my spirit animal.

Training - Daily Grind.

12/13 - db drag curl, wrist curls, hyperxtensions, calf press, treadmill 10min -- kb swing, wrist rollers, COCT, ab wheel, vacuum

Made of Awesome - Get Swole: 

"Jonathan Stoklosa is a 31-year-old power lifter who also has Down Syndrome. Jonathan Stoklosa lives in Newark, Delaware and works as a bagger at a local grocery store. Despite his gentle demeanor and smile, he spends his spare time training as an elite power lifter. This elite athlete can bench-press more than 400 pounds He can also squat and dead lift 440 pounds. He has also branched out beyond the Special Olympics and now competes in competitions that are open to all, against athletes who aren’t disabled."

 

 "Stoklosa took third in his age division after bench-pressing 402.5 pounds in a New York competition. At this same competition, he was awarded the “Most Inspirational” title, a unanimous choice by his competitors. He began lifting at 12-years-old and could bench-press 185 pounds by the time he was 13, and moved up to 225 by his 16th birthday. In 1999, he won gold in the Special Olympics World Games. “You can’t help but love him. When he competed last year, everybody showed up to watch him. They’re in awe of his gifts,” said Brochey, who organized the recent power lifting event Jon competed in, held at Mickey Rats in Angola, N.Y. “Once he gets up there, nobody notices any handicap he has. He’s a competitor. He’s just like everybody out there.”"

Dude got ripped on 2 rounds of X3.

T NATION | Vision Quest: 

"Now that I've had some time to think about it, I think this is what I'd say – or what I'd want to say – if asked the same questions again: "Luigi, when you were a kid, didn't you dream about going off to slay dragons? Didn't you dream about being some kind of hero? "And as you grew up and realized that you probably wouldn't be slaying any dragons, real or metaphorical, didn't you get tired of just watching others do physical things? Didn't you get tired of only being involved in surrogate achievement, you know, living vicariously through the basketball players, the soccer players, the Italian bocce ball players, or whoever it is you admire? "Maybe you actually were involved in some organized sport, but if you're like most conventional athletes, you only used weight training as a means to an end. You wanted to be a better tight end or a better power forward, but once you stopped competing in your sport, you stopped weight lifting."

"But you gotta' understand, people like me never stop lifting weights. The part of us that wanted to slay the dragon? It didn't die. It won't. "We seek to constantly get better, to get the perfect body or set a personal record or just be prepared for all the physical challenges – the what ifs the cosmos dumps on us. "But we know deep down that the perfect body or ultimate personal record can never really be achieved, because our imagination always sets the goal a step or two or three ahead of what we've accomplished. And we also know that the universe is merciless enough to give us a few physical challenges that we won't be, can't be, prepared for. "So it's not the goal that's important, it's the journey. The journey's the thing. The journey's the reward."

The gym is our sweat lodge and if you don't think a good squat or deadlift workout is purifying, then there are no suitable words to convince you otherwise; you have to experience it yourself. And I tell you, a good workout – no, a great workout, one where you have nothing left and you're sweating and you haven't held back on one rep of one set – is spiritual."

"So I smash my demons. I crush them under the bar. And if I’m too fucked up to train heavy, I torch them with extended sets, rip them apart with rest pauses and drop sets, and then chase them away with whatever fucked-up finishing exercise I can think of. The demons always come back, mind you, but as long as I have a key to my gym I can stay one step ahead." - Dave Tate