"...if you’re the type who doesn’t like to hang your hat on organized religion - In America, your numbers are growing."

Huzzah.

One nation without God: Why a post-religious America is upon us - Salon.com: "With fire-breathing religion figuring anew in global conflicts, and political discussions at home often dominated by the nuttery of the Christian right, you might get the sense that somebody’s god is ready to mug you around every street corner. But if you’re the type who doesn’t like to hang your hat on organized religion, here’s a bit of good news: In America, your numbers are growing. There are more religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. today than ever before. Starting in the 1980s, a variety of polls using different methodologies have come to the same conclusion: people who do not identify with religious labels are on the rise, perhaps even doubling in that time frame. Some call them “nones”: agnostics, atheists, deists, secular humanists, general humanists, and people who just don’t care to identify with any religious group. It’s not exactly correct to call them nonbelievers, because some still have faith and spirituality in some sense or another. A 2012 Pew study noted that 30 percent of these people believe in “God or universal spirit” and around 20 percent even pray every day. But according to the latest research, Americans checking the “none of the above” box will make up an increasingly important force in the country. Other groups, like born-again evangelicals, have grown more percentage-wise, but the nones have them beat in absolute numbers."

One nation without God: Why a post-religious America is upon us - Salon.com: "Last year, for the very first time, Protestants lost their majority status in the Institute’s annual report, making up only 47 percent of those surveyed. The religiously unaffiliated, who come in at 22 percent, boast numbers on par with major religious groups like American Catholics. All told, the unaffiliated is the second-largest group in the country. It was also the most common group chosen by residents in 13 states, with the largest share (a third or more) in Washington, Oregon and New Hampshire. In Ohio and Virginia, this group was tied for first place. The unaffiliated don’t find too many like-minded folks down in Mississippi, however, where they make up only 10 percent of the population"

One nation without God: Why a post-religious America is upon us - Salon.com: "So what do we know about these people? Nones tend to be more politically liberal — three-quarters favor same-sex marriage and legal abortion. They also have higher levels of education and income than other groups. While about one out of five Americans is unaffiliated, the number is much higher among young people: Pew research shows that a third of Americans under 30 have no religious affiliation. Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who studies religion, thinks the trend among younger people is part of their general lack of interest in community institutions and institutions in general."

  

"Marijuana smokers are not going to attack and kill a cop. They just want to get a bag of chips and relax." - DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier.

Washington, DC, police chief on marijuana: "All those arrests do is make people hate us" - Vox: "Lanier is making a nuanced but firmly supportive legalization argument. She said that marijuana isn't always healthy for users. But she also acknowledged that it's a relatively benign drug in terms of public safety, and its use is so widespread and accepted that arresting people for pot can actually do more harm than good by hurting police relations with the community. The comments are generally supported by drug experts and a vast body of research. Marijuana, with its tame effects on behavior, generally doesn't cause crime. But alcohol does: it's a factor in about 40 percent of violent crimes, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence...

""All those [marijuana] arrests do is make people hate us." She added, "Marijuana smokers are not going to attack and kill a cop. They just want to get a bag of chips and relax. Alcohol is a much bigger problem." The police chief clarified her comments to emphasize that she believes marijuana isn't healthy. "But I'm not policing the city as a mom," she said. "I'm policing it as the police chief — and 70 percent of the public supported this.""

"You have my word as leader of the white people, there's no cause for alarm."

"Let's keep Greendale weird." 

 

 Community Season 6 Trailer

"Don't make it more dramatic than it is.  It's a blood oath to defy evil."  

"I have a brain the size of Jupiter.  I'm nobody's 4th Ghostbuster."  

"You are the worst actor I've ever directed!  And I've directed both Walhbergs!" 

6 Seasons & a Movie!  Oh, yeah...

Training - "Change Does Not Come With Comfort."

3/4 - press, chins, dips, pike pushups, steam room

"If Your Favourite TV Shows Were "Game Of Thrones" Houses."

VIA:

 

Training - "A temporary setback is just that. It is temporary. It does not need to be permanent unless you allow it..."

3/3 - shadowbox, yoga

Bad Days Are Inevitable – Keep Grinding | RossTraining.com: 

"Keep Grinding 

Since we know that bad days are inevitable, they should not come as a surprise. Don’t be caught off guard and never let a bad day throw you off track. If you have goals that matter to you, you owe it to yourself to keep grinding. A temporary setback is just that. It is temporary. It does not need to be permanent unless you allow it...

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unfortunately the work never gets easier. I’ll even take it a step further and say that as you become stronger, the work becomes more difficult. It’s much more challenging to gain strength when you are already strong. A beginner to the game can gain strength by doing almost anything. That early phase of newbie gains will eventually expire however. It is at that point when you must really bear down and prepare for the long haul. True strength requires a significant investment in time."

   

Getting primal with Mark Sisson - LA Times: "Unless you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard of the primal/paleo diets. They urge us to "eat like a cave man" (or cave woman) and dine like our early ancestors did, consuming a diet brimming with foraged veggies, seasonal fruit, meats and seafood. The diets have lasted past the fad stage and show true staying power. They also earned a big boost last week when the Food and Drug Administration rolled back its admonitions on cholesterol, something the primal/paleo crowd has been saying for years. 

But the lifestyle goes beyond what's on your plate, said Mark Sisson, a retired triathlete and marathoner turned founder of the Primal Blueprint diet and the popular health website Mark's Daily Apple. Living like a caveman is just as important, and maybe even more so. To be sure, our ancestors had to deal with periodic stressors. Times when food was scarce. Or dodging a four-legged predator now and again. A brief timeline shows how we're gluttons for diet fads But early humans never had to deal with the ceaseless stressors brought about by today's 24/7 workaholic culture, Sisson said, not to mention crushing commutes, financial burdens and the tyranny of smartphones, with their never-ending need to check one more email account, one more social media platform. "Eating primally is just one aspect of an overall lifestyle," said Sisson, 61. "And that lifestyle is about the enjoyment of food and life and relationships and activity. And as much play as possible...

What about the rest of us, those of us who are chained to an office desk, no slack line in sight, no nearby hiking trail? "I'm the first to say that I have carved out the perfect life for me," Sisson said. "But everyone can get a good night's sleep and wake up to a cup of rich coffee and a few minutes of gratitude." "Everyone can find a way to stand up a little more and move around each day," he said, adding that he coaches newcomers to the primal lifestyle to start just by slashing the junk food and walk more, calling it the best exercise that there is. And if you can't, Sisson said, "Don't you think it's time to consider reorienting and reframing your life and how you live it?""

Funny, that.

Made of Awesome.

"Another series of terrorism arrests, another series of allegations that the government essentially manufactured them."

The arrested Brooklyn ISIS guys were not a threat to the U.S.—or probably to anyone.: "...a Times story this week under the wonderful headline “Eager to Join ISIS, if Only His Mother Would Return His Passport,” is pretty reassuring about the actual level of threat the group poses to the U.S.

The fact that this plot to wage holy war against the infidel depended on 19-year-old Akhror Saidakhmetov being able to sweet-talk his mom into giving him back his passport isn’t the only indication in the FBI’s case against the men, released just after their arrest, that we aren’t exactly dealing with future Bin Ladens here...

This would appear to be the latest in a long line of cases in which not-so-bright guys with dreams of jihad are nudged along (in some cases borderline entrapped) by FBI informants. Other examples have included the guy who attempted to detonate a dud bomb given to him by the bureau outside the Federal Reserve, the guy who attempted to detonate a fake suicide vest outside the capital, and the guy who tried to blow up a fake bomb at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland. All these men are serving lengthy prison sentences, though it’s not clear they would have gone as far as they had without the involvement of FBI informants posing as co-conspirators."

Via Morning links: DOJ expected to criticize Ferguson PD for racial bias - The Washington Post: "Another series of terrorism arrests, another series of allegations that the government essentially manufactured them."

#SeemsLegit

Belief isn't everything, but it's something - "Our research group has begun to show that beliefs are as powerful a physical influence on the brain as neuroactive drugs..."

Scientists discover beliefs can be just as powerful as nicotine: "Two identical cigarettes led to a discovery by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. Study participants inhaled nicotine, yet they showed significantly different brain activity. Why the difference? Some subjects were told their cigarettes were nicotine free...

"Our research group has begun to show that beliefs are as powerful a physical influence on the brain as neuroactive drugs," said Read Montague, director of the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and lead author of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Nicotine has formidable effects throughout the brain, especially in the reward-based learning pathways. Nicotine teaches the brain that smoking leads to reward. Once the brain learns that correlation, the addictive chemical cycle is difficult to break. 

In this study, scientists tracked the brain responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging. "We suspected that we would be able to see neural signals based on the subjects' belief rather than their actual nicotine intake," said Montague, who is also a professor of physics in Virginia Tech's College of Science...

Montague and his team found that the people who believed they had smoked nicotine cigarettes made different choices and had different neural signals than the other participants, despite the fact that both groups had consumed the same substance.   The scientists also found people who believed they had smoked nicotine had significantly higher activity in their reward-learning pathways. Those who did not believe they had smoked nicotine did not exhibit those same signals. "It was the belief alone that modulated activity in the learning pathway," Montague said. "This goes beyond the placebo effect." Multiple studies support the placebo effect, showing sham treatments can improve a patient's condition simply because the person believed it would be helpful. In the current study, however, researchers found belief alone could actually erase or enhance the effects of nicotine in participants who were under the influence of the active drug...

 "A drug can induce a belief state, which itself causes the change." Scientists might be able to harness this belief system, capable of inducing physiological changes, to reverse-engineer addiction. "Just as drugs micromanage the belief state," Montague said, "maybe we can micromanage beliefs to better effect behavior change in addiction.""

"And by true, I mean false."

"Real."

Training - "The Secret is in the Struggle."

3/2 - squats, knee raises, bench pistols, lunges

Alicia Coates - Mobile Uploads: "This is Mike, a male client of mine for 3+years, and has also become a dear friend of mine. We met when I trained in a small family owned studio, when I only dreamt of becoming a competitor. He watched me grow into the competitor and person I am today; little did I know he became viciously motivated by my life as it evolved. He trusted my advice as a female trainer and he trusted my advice as a female competitor... And I thank him for that. Shredded and down 60+ lbs. he walked on stage and won 1st place in Open Light Weight and 2nd in Novice... At his very first very first show. So, I want you to go to bed this evening with this in mind...at any stage in your life your journey could be the motivation and inspiration someone needs to find the champion within themselves. So be good to each other and help those who seek your help"

I have it on good authority that she does, in fact, squat.  Bro.

Dan Inosanto's Filipino Martial Arts Presentation at the Smithsonian.

Fascinating, beautiful and deadly.  & Dan Inosanto, in his mid-70s here, still moves better than men half his age.  Phenomenal.

His latter point about the influence of the FMA on Hollywood stunt work is spot-on.  You can see a lot of it on 'Arrow' - some very obvious and some more subtle - if you know what you're looking for.

The primary goal of any organization, whatever the original intent, is the continued existence & influence of that organization.

National Security State - Reason.com: "It seems ages ago now, but there really was a time when some civil libertarians held out hope for Barack Obama's presidency...  They and many other Obama optimists woke up to a hell of a hangover, one that's lasted six years. The president has launched more than six times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush; ordered the remote-control execution of an American citizen; continued and expanded dragnet domestic surveillance programs based on a secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act; and launched two undeclared wars...

The question Michael Glennon asks at the outset of his important new book, National Security and Double Government, is: "Why does national security policy remain constant even when one President is replaced by another, who as a candidate, repeatedly, forcefully, and eloquently promised fundamental changes in that policy?" His answer is altogether darker and more radical than you'd reasonably expect from a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee legal counsel and current international law professor at Tufts. Glennon argues, in essence, that the national security state has become a runaway train and that presidential elections are contests that determine who gets to pretend he's driving...

As power has shifted toward the permanent national security and intelligence bureaucracies, we face an "emergent autocracy" in the guise of a democratic republic. We've "moved beyond a mere imperial presidency," he writes, "to a structure of double government in which even the President exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of US national security policy." We're used to the idea that Congress has ceded most of its formal powers over national security policy to an aggrandizing chief executive. But it's counterintuitive, to say the least, to suggest that government's chief executive isn't really in charge...

The second conventional explanation for policy continuity is what Glennon calls the "government politics model." This emphasizes factors like the content of the president's character and the political pressures brought to bear on the presidency. Maybe, for example, what the Daily Brief really concentrates the president's mind on is political self-preservation. He becomes ever more aware that he's going to be held personally responsible if a bomb goes off anywhere in the country...

Glennon offers another explanation, one that has been overshadowed by the conventional wisdom's focus on the president as decider in chief. Policy continuity is better understood through the "organizational behavior model," he says, which looks to a "Trumanite network" of managers in the military, intelligence bureaucracies, and law enforcement "who are responsible for protecting the nation and who have come to operate largely immune from constitutional and electoral restraints." Glennon calls them "Trumanites" because of our 33rd president's role in founding the CIA, the modern Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Agency (NSA). Though Glennon doesn't describe his thesis in terms of public choice theory, it echoes that discipline's insight that institutions are run for the benefit of the people who run the institutions. For the Trumanites, Glennon explains, "benefits take the form of enlarged budgets, personnel, missions; costs take the form of retrenchments in each." Witness the vast archipelago of intelligence facilities-nearly three Pentagons' worth of office space-that have been erected in greater Washington, D.C., since 9/11."

"We knew it was good technology because it had the language of magic in it." - Warren Ellis

 "I’ve said, again and again, that Steve Jobs’ constant reiteration that the iPad was “magical” was deliberate and done with specific intent. And we listened. We knew it was good technology because it had the language of magic in it. We made it do things by pointing at it. The screen was full of sigils. It was a 21st Century spellbook, and, brilliantly, we didn’t have to charge it up by murdering a chicken or wanking on it. And when people now say, well, Apple aren’t innovating as much as they used to, what we mean is that they’re not making magical artifacts any more. Their magic carpet has fallen to earth and now they make wristwatches like lumpen mortals. Wristwatches aren’t magic. We already knew that time passed and we’d learned to approximate divisions of time by looking at the sky. We were telling the time five thousand years ago using large stones. Wristwatches just meant we didn’t have to carry a fucking obelisk around with us. Magic’s fickle. And it’s also true that, for every genuine seer and shaman, there was some theatrical guy in black trying to sell shiny magical things to people with money."

"Raise your standards for the one thing over which you have complete control—yourself."

"It means you've committed to being intelligent, flexible, and creative enough to consistently find a way to look at your life in a fashion that makes any experience enriching." - Tony Robbins

"Why are the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges...? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment?"

But for the video… - The Washington Post: "...here’s my question: Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail. If a group of regular citizens had pulled this on someone, they’d all likely be facing criminal conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and other charges. So why aren’t these cops and prosecutors? I could be wrong, but my guess is that they’ll all be let off due to “professional courtesy” or some sort of exercise of prosecutorial discretion. And so the people who ought to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us will once again be held to a lower one...

“He’d still be in a world of trouble if he didn’t have that film,” said David Cressy, a friend of Dendinger who once served as a prosecutor under [former St. Tammany District Attorney Walter] Reed. “It was him against all of them. They took advantage of that and said all sorts of fictitious things happened. And it didn’t happen. It would still be going like that had they not had the film.” Dendinger spent nearly a year waiting for trial, racking up attorney’s fees. As a disabled Army veteran on a fixed income, Dendinger said the case stretched him financially, but in his eyes, he was fighting for his life."

Original video here - Charges crumble after cell phone video uncovered