Training - "If you don't have the mental capacity to be that obsessed..."

9/17 - bench, dips, inc db press

Frank Medrano - Mobile Uploads: "Beautiful couple transformation. Remember, transformations take time. It's the little steps that you do each and every day that will bring you to your goal. Transformation is NOW!"

  

Aging is a choice.

"Civilization is just a mask they all wear."

Alfonso Ribeiro AKA Carlton Banks Tore The Goddamn Dance Floor Apart On 'Dancing With The Stars' Premiere:

Did no one realize the kid who danced with MJ was going to crush everybody?  Give the man the crown, the competition's over.

 Acting!

Canadian police on the job.:  

Training - "Doing even a little bit of fitness activity is much, much better than doing zero fitness."

9/16 - deadlifts, pulldowns, back xt, seated rows, steam room

The Danger of All-Or-Nothing Thinking… | Grapplearts: "...nothing is ever going to go exactly according to plan.  And this can be very frustrating. So frustrating in fact that some people just say, “Screw it, I’m not going to do anything then until I can do it perfectly.”  But this is a HUGE mistake...

Having something is better than having nothing. Maybe you used to go to the gym 3 times a week, and really enjoyed the feeling of being fit and strong.  But now you’ve got a newborn child in the house, plus her two year old brother suddenly became über-needy and needs even more of your attention all the time.  You love your kids and want to do the right thing, but dammit, you also miss your two hour workouts. At this point being a gym rat may no longer be in the cards for a few years, but maybe you can still load a kid in a baby-jogger a couple times a week and prevent your cardio from absolutely going in the toilet (here is the quick default cardio workout I used when my own kids were young) . 

Doing even a little bit of fitness activity is much, much better than doing zero fitness."

  

"I don’t really believe in authenticity as opposed to artifice..."

aboycanakwqysdream: sarpedom: ...: " I don’t really believe in authenticity as opposed to artifice, but that’s a philosophical distinction...

The point is not about the look or the makeup. It’s about the effort. Why should I work out? My muscles aren’t authentic, I didn’t get them sitting at my office job. Why should I learn a second language? It’s not authentic, I didn’t learn it growing up, I studied it in a classroom. See, when you apply that logic to literally anything else, it becomes transparently false. Sure, there are women who can be gorgeous without makeup. And men who can be ripped without spending a day in the gym. And people who can start a successful business without ever going to college. But let’s be real - you and I, we are not those people. They are the exception, not the rule."

Seems Legit.  

Insectoid preying mantis machines told me that everything is made out of magic. — SUPERNATURAL RIVER

Secret Law is Not Law - Boing Boing: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn is on fire: "Let’s be clear: Under international human rights law, secret “law” doesn’t even qualify as 'law' at all." The US Government and agencies like the DEA, NSA, TSA and FBI conduct mass-scale domestic surveillance on the basis of laws whose interpretations are held to be state secrets and matters of national security. From No-Fly lists to the FISA court, the US has adopted the principle that you are not allowed to know the law, but if you break it, you will be punished under it...

The breadth of the secret law is astonishing. For instance, only after the Snowden revelations did the government first admit its legal theories -- that its mass spying relied on outrageous secret interpretations of section 215 of the PATRIOT ACT and section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act -- neither of which even mentions mass surveillance much less authorizes it. We also now know about the NSA’s domestic telephone records collection and a past program that collected cell location information but we still don’t know the NSA’s full use of section 215...

Sometimes there’s no “law” at all. The NSA’s foreign collection processes, which are much more extensive than their domestic collections, are only ostensibly justified by an Executive Order, currently Executive Order12333. While E.O. 12333 is public, it’s not law at all and it certainly does not mention mass surveillance of millions of innocent people around the world. None of the government’s legal interpretations of it are public either. We've now seen evidence that this non-law with secret interpretations is the basis for the NSA's mass surveillance of communications not just in one place, but at nearly every step of their journey: from remote access to computers, to man-in-the-middle attacks on messages in transit, to attacking direct service providers like Google, to tapping into the undersea cables." 

Darwyn Cooke Returns To Draw Harley Quinn, As He Covers Everything In Sight - Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movie, TV News

Stereotypes exist for reasons.  Studies show:  Men are superficial, attracted to beauty, youth & cheerfulness.  Women are attracted to bad boys, guys who don't like them back, married men and status.  It's worldwide/cross-cultural and lasts until you die.  The science of sex: 4 harsh truths about dating and mating - The Week: "To make the best decisions, we cannot delude ourselves. I've posted many studies offering hope and inspiration but to be honest and fair, we also need to look at facts about people many like to deny. And that's where the science of sex comes in. If you wish to retain illusions that the realm of sex and relationships is pure as the driven snow or that outside of physical dimensions there are no fundamental differences between men and women, turn back now as I am about to open a large can of peer-reviewed whoop-ass. Naive romantics, I warn you one last time: ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE...

Those things we say we hate actually make us more attracted to people. When someone plays hot-cold, keeps you guessing, makes you constantly uncertain? Yeah, that makes you even more attracted: Participants in the uncertain condition were most attracted to the men — even more attracted than were participants who were told that the men liked them a lot. Uncertain participants reported thinking about the men the most, and this increased their attraction toward the men. [Psychological Science] Playing hard to get? It works. Had it up to here with narcissists? No, we haven't because they really are more attractive. You know what we like about them the most? The worst parts — their entitlement and exploitativeness: …narcissism leads to popularity at first sight. Second, the aspects of narcissism that are most maladaptive in the long run (exploitativeness/entitlement) proved to be most attractive at zero acquaintance. [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology]

...The science of sex tells us that the romantic comedies lie. Sex is an area where nice guys do finish last: In one survey of men, Trapnell and Meston (1996) found that nice guys who were modest, agreeable, and unselfish were disadvantaged in sexual relationships. Men who were manipulative, arrogant, calculating, and sly were more sexually active and had a greater variety of sexual experiences and a greater number of sex partners. [Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy] Women are very often attracted to bad boys like James Bond. In fact, research shows young women sometimes prefer out-and-out jerks: In the end, young women may continue to claim that they find certain qualities in a "good guy" nice guy as highly desirable and that they want to be in a committed relationship with one man as their ultimate goal, but, at the same time, they seem content to spend "the meantime and in-between-time" going out with fun/sexy guys who may or may not turn into "jerks."

...Happy guys, it seems, can be a turn-off: …happiness was the most attractive female emotion expression, and one of the least attractive in males. [Emotion]

...What do studies say can make a man more attractive? Among other things, a flashy car and throwing money around. Yes, that works. Women find married men more attractive than single men: …a group of women again rated photographs of men for attractiveness. The photos were accompanied by short descriptions, and when the men were described as "married," women's ratings of them went up. [Connected] And they find sexist men more appealing than non-sexist men, too...

Little of the above will be changing anytime soon. This is the science of sex, not the culture of it. Most, if not all, of these things are true around the world. In a study of over 1000 participants in three dozen cultures it was consistently found that men are focused on looks and women on status: Several standard sex differences replicated across cultures, including women's greater valuation of social status and men's greater valuation of physical attractiveness. [Personality and Individual Differences] 

But we grow out of it, right? Nope. Our tastes do not mature as we get older:  In fact, when men and women are in nursing homes, the guys are still looking for hot younger women and the ladies are still interested in men of high status: Across the life span, men sought physical attractiveness and offered status-related information more than women; women were more selective than men and sought status more than men. [Psychology and Aging]"

Sen. Lindsey Graham: 'They will open the gates of hell', 'This is ISIL versus mankind': "It's not just that ISIS is a threat to the region. It's not just that ISIS is a threat to America. ISIS is now a threat to all life on earth, or at least all human life. They are the hell-bringers. They are Ebola, plus the Nazis, plus a comet strike.They are catastrophic climate change, except Sen. Lindsey Graham believes in them... 

It's like the Lindsey Grahams of the world cannot exist without the Next Hitler. There always has to be another Hitler, at every moment, and we are always on the cusp of national or worldwide defeat by that Hitler if we do not respond with military resolve to every last thing, except the things we are not supposed to respond to because that would be interventionism, and if you have been able to discern a pattern between the two other than "does a Democratic leader support the thing?" then you need to write your theory up as a comprehensive explanation so that the rest of us can award you an applicable Nobel Prize."

 Texts from Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Training - "Pick People Up, Don't Put Them Down."

9/15 - press, seated db press, side/rear laterals, side swings, shrugs, neck nods/rotations - sauna, steam - neck harness 

Bodybuilding.com - International Transformation Of The Month: Jana Kovacovic:

The Struggle Is Real.

"Hey, I never thought of it that way."

I Love Cosplay —Mystique(X-MEN) | Miss...:

Barry Eisler - Imagine this: X proposes that we deal with ISIS by...: "Imagine this: X proposes that we deal with ISIS by dropping nuclear bombs on Mecca and Medina. I respond that this is an insane idea. And X then says, "Yeah? What do you propose instead?" Do you see how upside-down that framework is? What X proposes is insane. It's not a baseline, or default option, or otherwise something that ought to be done unless someone offers something better. Because -- pro-tip -- when the new proposed policy is something as insane as yet another undeclared, indeterminate American war in the middle east against a "threat" that even the president who is waging it and even the head of the Department of Homeland Security acknowledge is in no way imminent, among the nearly infinite variety of better alternatives is the most obvious of all: *no* change in policy. Because *no* change in our current policy toward ISIS would be preferable to a horrendously *bad* change. And anyone who can't recognize that *no* change in policy is better than a horrendously *bad* change in policy is either attracted to war for its own sake or lobotomized by propaganda. Or both."

All Else Being Equal, Assume Love: "Now to be sure no one gets married for perfectly benign reasons of saintly love for their partner, but invariably people do indeed marry from a desire to love and be loved. Misunderstandings and tiredness imputed with an assumption of a lack of love, will quickly spiral the relationship into a dark place. It can be incredibly destructive to a relationship to have the wife’s girlfriends endlessly explaining what’s wrong with men and how secretly abusive all of them are. It can be incredibly destructive to a relationship to have the husband’s manly mentors endlessly explaining what’s wrong with women and how secretly abusive all of them are. It can be incredibly destructive to a relationship to have the culture endlessly repeating a badly written sitcom assumption that love, sex and happiness ends at the altar. 

So all else being equal, assume love."

[Return of the] Food Log.

The next training block [11 weeks until Thanksgiving - and then + the 3-4 weeks after that till Xmas - & starting from last Monday, Sep 8th] emphasis on fat loss, with secondary strength and tertiary hypertrophy goals.  Stopped doing food log posts in the summer, as it was feeling a little OCD & counterproductive, plus a month-long out of town visitor/hosting/gluttony & inebriation-fest... but back at it now.  Need a little OCD to dial the nutrition back in after the pause.  Playing with low'ish carbs with some CKD/carb refeed 1x/week & ensuring adequate protein intake - 1g/lb bodyweight.  

9/8 - water, Helios, coffee, cream, Animal Pump, Cannibal Inferno, Cannibal Alpha, ON 100% Whey, Onnit TPC, Fish Oil, butter, steak, eggs

9/9 - water, Helios, coffee, cream, Animal Pump, Cannibal Inferno, Cannibal Alpha, ON 100% Whey, Onnit TPC, Fish Oil, hamburger, tomatoes, sour cream, cheddar, parmesan

9/10 - coffee, cream, water, Onnit TPC, Animal Pump, Cannibal Inferno, Cannibal Alpha, ON 100% Whey,  Helios, Fish Oil, peanut butter, hamburger, cheddar

9/11 - coffee, cream, water, Animal Pump, Cannibal Inferno, ON 100% Whey, Helios, peanut butter, Cannibal Alpha, Fish Oil, Onnit TPC, butter, pork, chicken

9/12 - coffee, cream, water, Animal Pump, Cannibal Inferno, ON 100% Whey, Helios, peanut butter, Cannibal Alpha, Fish Oil, Onnit TPC, butter, steak, rice, kimchi

9/13 - coffee, cream, water, Cannibal Inferno, water, free/cheat day - Ippudo tonkotsu ramen, pork bun, karaage, spicy shrimp mayo, Asahi beer, chocolate bar, chocolate milk, peanut butter, Reeses PB cups

9/14 - coffee, cream, water, ON 100% Whey, Helios, peanut butter, beef, pork, chicken