"... the legitimacy of cable news sounds to me like an oxymoron."

Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President — Medium: "There is nothing actually legitimate about Fox News (or MSNBC for that matter) and young people know this. They don’t trust news organizations because news organizations have given them no reason to be trusting. These channels exist not to inform but to uphold the biases and values of particular ideologies. Ideologies and values, by the way, that very few young people embody. Even when they try to strike a balance, they do it by pitting different perspectives against each other in staged arguments. But neither perspective looks familiar to most people under the age of 40, so they just tune out..." 

Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President — Medium: "This complete lack of objectivity and representation in cable news has degraded the legitimacy of news media as a whole. Young people have absolutely no faith in people sitting at desks on television anymore. It’s gotten so bad that the most trusted news show among people under 40 is on Comedy Central...

Legacy media isn’t mocking us because we aren’t a legitimate source of information; they’re mocking us because they’re terrified. Their legitimacy came from the fact that they have access to distribution channels and that they get to be in the White House press pool because of some long-ago established procedures that assumed they would use that power in the public interest. In reality, those things are becoming less and less important and less and less true. Distribution is free to anyone with a cell phone and the legitimacy of cable news sounds to me like an oxymoron. The median-aged CNN viewer is 60. For Fox, it’s 68...

This is the real source of legacy media’s belittling and diminishing language around our interviews with Obama. They have degraded their own legitimacy so much that, to a lot of people, I (a 34-year-old former bio-chemist and current video blogger) appear to be a more legitimate source of unbiased thought and information than the fucking news...

I think sub-consciously they understand the really terrifying thing here. Glozell and Bethany and I weren’t put in a chair next to President Obama because we have cultivated an audience. We were put there because we have cultivated legitimacy. The source of our legitimacy is the very different from their coiffed, Armani institutions. It springs instead (and I’m aware that I’m abandoning any modicum of modesty here) from honesty. In new media this is often called “authenticity” because our culture is too jaded to use a big fat word like “honesty” without our gallbladders clogging up, but that’s really what it is...

The relationship between press and the politician was once good for everyone. It was good for the press, for the politician, for the Americans, and for the country. We’ve lost that. Certain press organizations have degraded their own legitimacy by forgetting that their responsibility is to more than the shareholder. That degradation has, for young people, spread throughout the entire news media either in fact or in perception. In the process the legitimacy not just of individual politicians but the entire political process has been whittled down."

Training.

1/28 - deadlift, bridge, stretch

Squat. Press. Pull.: " weightliftingcanadian: 60 year old former coach of Mikhail Koklyaev with a 200kg/440lb deadlift"

"You all just clapped for a dead baby." - Louis CK.

Louis C.K. Is Totally Cool With The Patriots Deflating Balls And Cheating To Win: "“Sometimes you do stuff that’s not fair so that you can win. I have no problem with it. I think it’s hilarious. It’s a stupid football game; Deflate the balls, poke the guy in the eye or something…. It’s football.”

LAPD, Which Tracks Citizens Through Their Phones, Worries About You Doing the Same to Them - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "There are a million ways some violent, crazy person could track down or lure police with the intent of ambushing or killing them, including following their cars or, you know, simply calling the police and reporting a fake crime. In my neighborhood, they can apparently just walk right up to the local police station and shoot at them (as far as I can tell, they still haven’t caught that guy, assuming that shooting actually happened). Hey, would you like to listen to Los Angeles Police and Fire scanner traffic? It’s right here! This is not a request to be treated seriously, and we should all recognize it for what it is—an effort to keep citizenry from providing information to each other to help stay out of the clutches of law enforcement’s money-grubbing traffic enforcement adventures. Reminder: The LAPD uses technology to track people’s locations via their smartphones. Turnabout is fair play."

Boozey Intel Agent Crashes Drone at White House, Which Spurs Call for Regulations - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "And oh yeah, about the guy who was operating the drone (a quad-copter model that was about two feet across and weighed all of two pounds)? It turns out he's an employee of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which itself uses drones for all sorts of stuff, but that's fine because you know, it's the government."

Kung Fu Monkey: LIBRARIANS #107 "Rule of Three" Answer Post: "(NOTE the third: I don't believe in the supernatural, so please rest assured I respect Wicca as much as I respect all other more traditionally accepted religious beliefs -- as one of many available cool personal operating systems one might use to comprehend a vast and nigh-infinite universe. I know that these operating systems are deeply emotionally resonant to most of you.  I'm not mocking, and the show will farm from various religious traditions for story points as cultural frameworks and legendary narratives, with as much respect as we can muster. We will sometimes fail. Sorry about that.)"

Kung Fu Monkey: LIBRARIANS #107 "Rule of Three" Answer Post: "...cute, fluffy otters are actually the monstrous rape-murderers of the sea."

The Other Side of Otters : Discovery News: "Sea otters – cute, furry, adorable, clams-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths sea otters – have been observed forcibly copulating with, and in the process killing, juvenile harbor seals off California. Writing in a recent edition of the journal Aquatic Mammals, Heather Harris of the California Department of Fish and Game and colleagues document nineteen occurrences of this behavior in Monterey Bay between 2000 and 2002, leading to the deaths of at least 15 seals."

No, Mass Surveillance Won't Stop Terrorist Attacks - Reason.com: "...the mass surveillance programs initiated by the U.S. government after the 9/11 attacks—the legal ones and the constitutionally-dubious ones—were premised on the belief that bin Laden’s hijacker-terrorists were able to pull off the attacks because of a failure to collect enough data. Yet in their subsequent reports on the attacks, the Congressional Joint Inquiry (2002) and the 9/11 Commission found exactly the opposite. The data to detect (and thus foil) the plots was in the U.S. government’s hands prior to the attacks; the failures were ones of sharing, analysis, and dissemination. That malady perfectly describes every intelligence failure from Pearl Harbor to the present day. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (created by Congress in 2004) was supposed to be the answer to the "failure-to-connect-the-dots" problem. Ten years on, the problem remains, the IC bureaucracy is bigger than ever, and our government is continuing to rely on mass surveillance programs that have failed time and again to stop terrorists while simultaneously undermining the civil liberties and personal privacy of every American. The quest to "collect it all," to borrow a phrase from NSA Director Keith Alexander, only leads to the accumulation of masses of useless information, making it harder to find real threats and costing billions to store."

Morning links: Record number of exonerations in 2014 - The Washington Post: "Last year saw a record 125 exonerations, including six people on Death Row."

Lies, damned lies, statistics.  Be careful with that viral statistic about the top 1% owning half the world’s wealth - Vox: "In recent days, there's been a startling statistic going around. The number comes from Oxfam, and warns that the combined wealth of the richest one percent will pass that of the other 99 percent next year, at least if current trends hold. The statistic has been reported in the Guardian, the New York Times, and FiveThirtyEight, among others. Even Hillary Clinton is using a version of it. But it doesn't mean quite what it looks like it means. To see the problem, here's another version of the same number: the combined wealth of my two nephews is already more than the bottom 30 percent of the world combined. And they don't have jobs, or inheritances. They just have a piggy bank and no debt. Oxfam presents the statistic, which is derived from data published in Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Databook (pdf), as a measure of wealth. But it's technically a measure of net worth: assets minus debts. As such, what it's picking up isn't just massive inequality in wealth, but also massive inequality in the ability to access credit. So for the purposes of Oxfam's calculation, a farmer in China's rural Sichuan province with no debt but also very little money is wealthier than an American who just graduated from medical school with substantial debt but also a hefty, six-figure income. By any sensible standard, the medical student is richer, but because her student debt still outweighs her financial assets, the net worth measure counts her as poorer than the Chinese peasant."

Training.

1/27 - chins, bw row, grip/holds & COCT, stretch

"It's not what happens that counts..."

U.S. Military Honors Saudi King with Essay Contest (Seriously) - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff want to make sure everybody knows just how dearly the U.S. military treasured its friend, the recently departed king of Saudi Arabia. To that end, the Department of Defense has commissioned an essay contest to honor the late monarch, whose friendship with the U.S. was exceeded only by his sponsorship of terrorism, butchery, and oppression. King Abdullah "moderate beheadings" Bin Abdul-Aziz passed away last week at age 90. Here is how the U.S. government glowingly describes his reign...

“In my job to train and advise his military forces, and in our relationship since, I found the king to be a man of remarkable character and courage,” Dempsey said. Because it takes remarkable character and courage to preside over a country that routinely beheads enemies, tortures political dissidents, and jails religious dissenters. Credit where credit is due, however: An essay contest commemorating a Middle Eastern tyrant has to be one of the more creative ways for the federal government to waste our money I've seen lately."

Why the Pentagon Is Honoring the Late Saudi King | TIME: "The last time the Defense Department achieved notoriety as a platform for views on Saudi Arabia was in 2002, between the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s when a Rand Corp. analyst told a high-level panel behind closed doors that the kingdom was “active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader.” Washington, he said, should declare the Saudis the enemy and threaten to take over the oil wells if they didn’t do more to combat Islamist terrorists (the briefing was 10 months after the 9/11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 terrorists were Saudi). 

The Pentagon quickly distanced itself from Laurent Murawiec’s presentation to the Defense Policy Board. Secretary of State Colin Powell called the Saudi foreign minister to apologize. 

On Monday, the top U.S. military leader, Army General Martin Dempsey, announced the Pentagon would be conducting a “research and essay competition” to honor Saudi King Abdullah, who died Jan. 23 at 90, as “a man of remarkable character and courage.” Critics pounced."

And he's just crazy enough to do it, too.  Joss Whedon on ‘Age of Ultron’: “The Avengers Must Die”:

  

 If McConaughey comes at the king, he'd best not miss.

"No chick-flick moments."

They don't give a fuck about you.  In fact, they probably fucking hate you.

Henry Kissinger: "'Military men are ‘dumb, stupid animals to be used’ as pawns for foreign policy.' As quoted in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, The Final Days (Simon & Schuster, 2005)"

"From now on, you don't have to be that anymore."

Stealth Level: Ninja. 

TB... Monday?  Yeah, Throwback Monday.

"And all of a sudden

He brought in a cut 

And I dropped my microphone and said

"What the?  

Hold up.  

Jeff.  

Wait a minute.  

Play it." 

He just smiled and said 

"Yeah def ain't it?""

Training.

1/26 - press, dips, crow, pike pushups, stretch

1/23 - sick day

1/22 - bench, pushups