Perspectives.

Training.

6/13 - boxing [alternating] 5x2m rounds shadowboxing, 5x2m rounds bag work, 9x3 pullups [during round breaks] + 1x15, neck nods/rotations/shoulder to ear

6/12 - dl 10/5x8, rows 3x8, chins x15

6/11 - PruFit [3 rounds/50 hyperx, 50 situps, 2 laps] - pulls/chins 2x12

Awesome Results - Bodybuilding.com - Body Transformation: Never Surrender:

Remember.

“There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death..."

Today's Philosophy 101.

All you need to know to understand Catholicism.

Plus your general Christian insight bonus.

"Don't you believe in God?" - "Which one? Could you be more specific?"

Ah, who am I kidding... the answer is "no" pretty much whichever one you choose. 

List via the honest atheist.

African Gods

Australian Gods

Aztec Gods

Caribbean Gods

More after the break/jump...

"How a Secret Memo Justifies a Kill List!"

Broken America.

"The Atheist Pig" is made of awesome.

Blasphemy just seems more fulfilling coming from a pig.  Homepage here/my favorites from the archives, below.

"Bath Salts" are fine, you fear-mongering, nanny-state morons.

Bath Salts, Naked Zombie Cannibals & Stupid Senators - Hit & Run : Reason.com:

"...It all started on a Florida offramp in broad daylight when a car-washing Bible-thumper snapped, allegedly under the influence of zombie dust. The story soon eclipsed the presidential election and Miley Cyrus' lack of underwear as the most important issue in the country. There was an immediate obsession with the substance that “caused” this unnatural act.

To date, there’s no evidence that Sunshine State face-chewer Rudy Eugene was in fact whacked out on bath salts. The Miami Mauler had been arrested at least eight times since he was 16 and had threatened to kill his Mom on at least once violent occasion.

Here’s the problem with banning “synthetic methamphtemine” - or the real thing, for that matter: There are an infinite number of ways that natural and artifical drugs can be combined, married and sewn together to get a user higher Matthew McConaughey on any given Monday. Science will always be one step ahead of the legislative process, so as quickly as a chemical compound is banned, four more will spring forth from crafty laboratories eager to pacify those seeking a quick fix..."

Via http://suburra.com/blog

Let it not be said...

...that my other half and I did not take advantage of our last 5 months in Africa.  First, in March we hit up Sierra Leone, then in May we tagged Morocco and also extended a training trip for the Mrs in Ghana, where the highlight was catching 'The Avengers' [I wear my geek card with pride, I do...]

...and finally, this past week we did a safari [and a day in Nairobi] in Kenya.  Which was all kinds of awesome.

More pics from Kenya here...

Training.

6/10 - x100 superset bw rows/hyperx [20, 2x15, 3x10, 20] - GTG protocol towel pullups 3reps per pass

6/9 - chinups x100 [15, 3x10, 6x5, 9, 7, 9]

6/8 - 10x2m rounds shadowboxing

6/7 - hindu pushups/squats/bridge - 15/30/30 x3, x20 deep breathing, dynamic tension pulldown/pullaparts, bi/tri, band dislocates/pullaparts

6/6 - Giant Set 3x25 glute bridge/air squats/hindu squats/Atlas squats/lunges/SLDL/calf raise - neck nods/rotations x100 [50/50, 2x25/25] - 5m sun salutations

6/5 - x100 reps - band presses/lat pulls/pull aparts/bicep/tricep - pushups 10x10

6/4 - Giant Set 4x10 [pushups, deep breathing, dynamic tension pulldowns/pullaparts/bicep-tricep, glute bridge, hindu squats, band dislocates/chest pulls/face pulls, supermans, vacuum] - 5x2m rounds heavy bag

Cooking/Food Log.

Vacation abroad this past week, so filled with airplane, restaurant and indulgence foodstuffs.  Tighter this coming week, gotta give the digestive system a break.

6/4 - water, protein shake, V8, chicken, rice, peas, carrots, beef, potatoes, green beans, butter
6/5 - coffee w/milk, Tusker beer, beef consomme', salad, veg tempura, chicken, burgers, cocktails, lamb & mint gravy, Kit Kat, water
6/6 - coffee w/sugar & milk, chips, beer, whiskey, steak, gravy, carrots, broccoli, rice, water
6/7 - coffee w/sugar & milk, water, beer, wine, beef carpaccio, insalada caprese, fried shimp, calamari, pasta, chocolate mousse
6/8 - coffew w/milk, eggs, bacon, macadamia chocolate, water, Diet Coke, chips, beer, meat [Carnivore], coffee & whiskey, salad, cake
6/9 - coffee w/creamer, whiskey & Diet Coke, coffee w/milk, protein shake, Coke Zero, Milky Way, chips, cookies

Training.

6/3 - db dl, db rows, push press, glute bridge/hip thrust/bird dog, 3x2m rounds shadowboxing, 3x2m rounds bag work

One of the most inspirational things I've ever seen.  Made of Complete Awesome.
Never Too Late - Never Too Old - Never Give Up.

Extended Cut.

Original Video Filmed & Edited by Arthur Boorman's son.

"Watch Arthur Boorman's amazing journey -- filmed and edited by his 19-year-old son Warren -- as he sets a goal to walk again and to reclaim his life. An Army veteran who was hurt in the first Gulf War, Arthur suffered for 15 years with the effects of a botched surgery that left him unable to walk without the assistance of leg braces and canes. By February 2007, he had ballooned to 297 pounds and, by his own admission, was waiting to die. In looking for a yoga program to alleviate some of his constant pain, Arthur found the YRG workout created by Diamond Dallas Page. He gained inspiration and strength from DDP and other members of Team YRG to propel him toward his goal -- "I Will Walk Again!" -- and, ultimately, to blow past it. Watch here as Arthur vividly demonstrates that life is not about how many times you fall down -- it's about how many times you get up."

Training.

6/2 - weighted vest supersets [pullups/wide dips, chins/narrow dips, pushups, rows] + hyperextensions - db shrugs.

Reality Check/Time Hack - with having lost most of this week to a cold, next week in Kenya and our household goods, including my weights, packed up in early July - finishing this round of P90X just isn't going to work.  Had I not finished a complete round last year I'd feel much more like a quitter/loser, but this year it just is what it is.  Take another run at it another time.  Besides, with travel this last month and next week, anything approaching consistent nutrition has been an abortion of indulgence and bad planning.  Plan for the next 6.5 weeks is, roughly, daily workouts + [after Kenya] limited junk food & liquor to 1X a week and/or evenings out.  Onwards.

6/1 - Motivation flameout.  I suck.

5/28 through 5/31 - missed P90X 43 through 46 due to sickness

5/27 - P90X 42 Kenpo X [switched days 42 & 41]

5/26 - P90X 41 off/rest

5/25 - P90X 40 Chest, Triceps & Shoulders - Abs

5/24 - P90X 39 Yoga X

5/23 - P90X 38 Legs & Back

Bodybuilding.com - International Transformation Of The Month: Aussie Bests The Bulge:

True Religious Understanding.

A bunch of these cribbed from the newly discovered the honest atheist.

Religious & Spiritual YouTube Spiral.

Of course, once you stop caring what other people think, it matters less.

"When I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity or scarifying or showing a lot of flesh or dancing to syncopated music or getting loaded or violating canons of ordinary sexual behavior, I applaud all of this." - Terence McKenna

Geek Video/YouTube Spiral Roundup.

Good stuff.

Yep, we dodged some bullets on this one.

The classic.

RAW Wisdom.

Great Robert Anton Wilson Interview over at Cleveland Okie.  Some excerpts:

"I like pacifists, as a rule, and people who have a heavy emotional identification with deathism and war would probably call me a pacifist, but I am a non-invasivist rather than a non-violentist. That is, I believe that an invaded people have the right to defend themselves "by any means necessary" as the expression goes. This includes putting ground glass or poison in the invaders' food, shooting at them from ambush, sabotage, the general strike, armed revolution, all forms of Gandhian civil disobedience, etc. It's up to the invaded to decide which of these techniques they will use. It's not up to some moralist to tell them which techniques are permissible. As Tucker said, "There is nothing sacred in the life of an invader."

...You can "prove" anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning. Empirically, I don't think they can produce a single case in history where a free people elected landlords to own the land; the land monopoly always starts with conquest. Shot and shell are the coins of purchase, as Herbert Spencer said. Except by force of arms, nobody "owns" the earth, anymore than the moon, the planets, the stars themselves. When did God disinherit the majority of humanity, and turn all space over to the "ownership" of the Rockefellers and their friends? Without armed power threatening us, why would anyone but a fool continue to pay these conquistadores the extortion they demand? And, even if the Austrians could convince me that rent is legitimate, I still wouldn't voluntarily pay it to the present landlord class who remain receivers of stolen property. I would pay it to the nearest Indian tribe.

As for interest, I'm not aware of any case in which the credit monopoly has allowed a free currency to compete with them. In fact, every case I know of (e.g. Worgl in the 1930s), ended when the Capitalists used the armed might of the State to stop the competition. The one laboratory experiment in this field, by Don Werkheiser at Central State University in Ohio, confirmed Tucker and refuted the Austrians. Money, after all, is anabstract artifact, like language -- merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. The average primate cannot distinguish the symbol from the referrent, the map from the territory, the menu from the meal. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money. As Bucky Fuller says, you might as well argue we can't build roads because we lack kilometers.

...Of course, my position is based on the denial that money does store wealth. I think it's a semantic hallucination, the verbal equivalent of an optical illusion, to speak at all of money containing or storing wealth. Such thinking should have gone out with phlogiston theory. The symbol is not the referent; the map is not the territory. Money symbolizes wealth, as words symbolize things, and that's all. The delusions that money contains wealth is the mechanism by which the credit monopoly hof study. as gained a stranglehold on the entire economy. As Colonel Greene pointed out in Mutual Banking, all the money could disappear tomorrow morning and the wealth of the planet would remain the same. However, if the wealth disappeared -- if squinks from the Pink Dimension dragged it off to null-space or something -- the money would be worth nothing. You don't need to plow through the dialects of the debate between the Austrians and the free credit people like Tucker and Gesell to see this; any textbook of semantics will make it clear in a few hours of study. Wealth is nature's abundance, freely given, plus the exponential advance of technology via human intelligence, and as Korzybski and Fuller demonstrate, this can only increase an an accelerating rate. Money is just the tickets or symbols to arrange for the distribution -- either equitably, in a free money system, or inequitably, as under the tyranny of the present money-cartel. As you realize, a cashless society could exist merely by keeping bookkeeping entries or computer tapes. Money is a primitive form of such computer tapes, serving a feedback function. If we are not to replace the present banking oligopoly with a programmer's oligopoly, in which the interest will be paid to computer technicians, we must realize that this is all a matter of abstract symbolism -- that it exists by social agreement and nobody owns it, anymore than Webster owns the language. Why is it, incidentally, that the Austrians don't follow their logic to its natural conclusion and demand that we pay interest to the dictionary publishers every time we speak or write?

You have to watch people playing Monopoly, and see them begin to "identify" the paper markers with real value, to understand how the mass hypnosis of Capitalism works."

"Christmas Shouldn't Be About Materialism. It Should Be About Status Consciousness & Money-Shame."

Transmet Wisdom.