Damn right - "Books. That is exactly how they work."

Training.

Shadowboxing - Bas Rutten MMA Workout - 3x2m rounds - Thai Boxing
P90X D29 - Cardio X - Chest/Shoulders/Triceps - Abs

"Michael Bolton we're really gonna need you to focus up" - Lonely Island FTW.

"Turns out Michael Bolton is a major cinephile."

Man, is there nothing from the 80s that can't come back?

Almost makes me want to play video games...

Almost.

Food/Cooking.

Mixed up for the Mrs - baked chicken spaghetti, an egg/spinach fritatta-ish dish, salad and scrambled egg & hash browns comfort food.

Nutrition mostly on point this week.  Still need to work on drinking more water, less coffee & diet sodas.  Not to mention not  finishing off that bottle of wine because it was "leftover" and sitting there, taunting me. 

Free/Cheat/Off meals... ice cream, beer, baked chicken spaghetti.  Plus - not pictured - a couple burritos & Coronas from a late Cinco de Mayo get together.

The Mrs classic layered dip, for that same Mexican themed shindig.  The wife digs a themed event, I tell you...

Why wouldn't it?

Texts From Last Night: "(506): yeah, she started doing yoga and cocaine....looks good on her."

Training.

Shadowboxing - Bas Rutten MMA Workout - 10x2m rounds/boxing
Shoulder dislocates/back hyperxtensions
P90X D28 - Core Synergistics

5/7 - P90X D27 - Rest/Free/Off
5/6 - P90X D26 - Yoga - Tony Horton One-one-One 'Patience Hummingbird'
5/5 - P90X D25 - Yoga - Tony Horton One-one-One 'Patience Hummingbird' - Tabata DB Swings 8x20/10 @25lbs
5/4 - P90X D24 - Core Synergistics
5/3 - Shadowboxing - Bas Rutten MMA Workout - 5x3m rounds/boxing - P90X D23 - XStretch
5/2 - P90X D22 - KenpoX

These posts are always more fun on Sundays.

Ah yes, the one true faith.  Wait, what?

"The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born..." - Robert Anton Wilson

"The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the... principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization." - RAW

First made my own connection to how brainwashing works, maybe 10 years ago or so, a few years out of the military and just into reading a swath of Robert Anton Wilson's books, particularly Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology. One of those realizations that's obvious in hindsight... I mean, they tell you up front what they're going to do to you in military indoc - "Break you down to build you back up." - but they gloss over a bit that they're going to wipe your personal psychology away and repattern you into something they want. Which is, you know, someone who will "charge that hill" when all rationality, common sense and instincts of self-preservation would think that insane.

Wilson's writings, showing step by step, using Leary's circuit model of consciousness, how that's done, was illuminating.  While the books were a great deal more detailed, almost all the main points you can find in two articles widely available online - "How to Wash a Brain" and "I, Robot."  [The latter briefer and more succinct, the former lengthier, but draws some interesting parallels between different contexts like the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Charles Manson and Lt. William Calley.]

The parts that always stuck out for me included, in step one, the biosurvival circuit - you take control of access to food, bodily functions, regulated sleeping schedules - often interrupted to create more disorientation/panic group bonding, bonding with the 'authority' who can increase or decrease your sense of helplessness.  That helplessness feeding into the second level emotional-territorial circuit.  Which feeds into tribe/pack/group ego & dynamics.  You take people just coming into adulthood and a sense of personal responsibility and immediately infantilize them.  They can no longer feed themselves, have to ask permission to go to the bathroom and are no longer even in charge of when they are tired enough to go to sleep.  The third level symbolic circuit is activated by use of in-group language and jargon - you have to learn a whole new language for things you "knew" previously, further wiping your connections to whoever you were in the past and bonding you to your new peer group.  And while military indoc or cult-y religions are these processes magnified and accelerated, as the first quote points out, the most common form of brainwashing is the slow motion brainwashing of socialization and acculturation.  If you don't occasionally remind yourself of that, you will forget.  Brainwash yourself or be brainwashed by others.  Your call.

"...The quickest way to re-imprint the third brain is to detach the victim from those who share the same language, symbols and doctrines by placing the victim in a situation where his usual verbal skills and physical dexterity won’t work, where he has to imprint new signals and skills in order to survive. For example, it is well known that the best way to learn a foreign language is by living with those who speak that language only: Hook the first-circuit survival needs (food, shelter) and the second-circuit status needs (security, recognition) to the third-circuit necessity of mastering the new tongue...

In order to maintain one’s reality bubble, it is necessary to surround oneself with tribal reassurance...

Isolation, the first step in brainwashing, removes this protective bubble. When the subject no longer receives feedback — “We’re all still here; nothing has changed” — the imprints begin to fade. Explorers and shipwrecked sailors who have survived prolonged isolation, Dr. Lilly has noted, are quite shy after being rescued. They are literally afraid of human conversation — sometimes for weeks — because they know that what they will say might sound insane to the domesticated ordinary adult; their imprints have faded and they are in the unconditioned free-floating world of the yogi or the mystic. It takes many days, at least, to re-imprint their social bubble...

[Rusty] joins the Army; during basic training, he is isolated from civilian society and all reinforcers of domesticated-herd imprints; his food, clothing and shelter are provided by the Army; and new authority figures make him feel helpless and inferior. Once Rusty has been reduced to an infant state and made totally dependent on the new father figures, he is allowed to work his way up in the new pecking order and to become one of the elect. After a few weeks of being made to feel one foot tall, helpless and clumsy, he is given weekend leave to explore the new soldier morality of easy camaraderie and socially approved casual sex. (And where else in straight America is casual sex so enthusiastically approved?)

Day after day, Rusty’s third brain is being programmed with military jargon, military concepts, military reality. When he encounters civilians on the street during weekend leaves, they seem alien. Rusty has now been fully incorporated into the Army reality bubble. When his superior officer, Medina, shouts “Kill!,” Calley will not ask about the Articles of War, the Nuremberg precedents, the ethics of Sunday school — they belong to other reality islands. He kills. The whole function of the reimprinting in basic training has been to ensure that Calley will obey in such situations..."

"So... the rainbow is God saying "'I won't kill everyone with another flood?'"

'"Colombiana" Trailer' - Zoe Saldana is a badass female Batman. With guns.

How to deal with everything. All the time. Forever and ever. Amen.

Boom. "Ron Paul: We didn't need a war in Afghanistan to get Bin Laden; now that we have, let's end that war."

Via The GOP Debate: Not Quite Live Blogged - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

"72 Virgins. As Promised..."

"They should have captured Bin Laden alive and made him..."

They should have captured Bin Laden alive and made him continually go through airport security for the rest of his life.        Favorite Retweet Reply
John Perrotto
jperrotto

"Some of you say that religion makes people happy..."

Via Dedroidify: Funnies

"...what I think when I hear priests quote statistics about molestation" - So. Much. This.

"I shot Bigfoot yesterday. I ate him and dumped the remains in the lake before I could prove it. Just take my word for it. Seriously." - Doug Stanhope

Truth/Perspective 101 - "Osama Won" Via Hit & Run: Reason Magazine.

Osama Won - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:

"...Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11...

We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.

We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.

In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.

We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.

The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are implicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.

The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.

Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)

The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.

The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.

Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.

American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.

Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.

The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants..."

Twitter excels at the Osama commentary.