Training.

10/19 - stretch, squats [PR 335, repPR 225x15, both w/belt], sauna

10/17 - sprints, tug-o-war, chins

Training - "When in doubt..."

10/16 - stretch, bench [PR 280, repPR 205x15], db rows, incline press, curls, pushups

Training - "If you think lifting weights is dangerous..."

10/13 - stretch, deadlifts [PR 465 - mixed grip, chalk, belt], situps, back xt

10/9 thru 12 - light daily stretching

Katie Anne - Katie Anne's Photos: "January 7th, 2011. One of the lowest points in my fitness journey. I have been there - struggling with binges, feeing horrible in my own skin, and always comparing myself to the fitness models in the magazines, thinking I would never be good enough. I have been underweight and I have been overweight. Once I stopped focusing on others and where they were - and started focusing on taking my journey ONE day at a time, I started to see results. Time will pass whether you decide to move forward or not. Have I had slip ups and set backs in the four and a half years since that photo? Oh you bet I have. But I see far too many people focusing on the end result when there really is no destination. I may have transformed externally but I am just as much of a work in progress as anyone else. A physique won't make you happy. A body weight will not make you happy. Focusing on the process is easier said than done but is VITAL for success in anything. I let go of my obsession with the stage and finally was working out because I loved it - not because of a date on the calendar. I stopped looking at photoshopped fitness girls, unfollowed a ton of people who posted daily naked "progress" photos (that actually left me feeling down - cut that shit out if it does for you too!). Instagram and social media are like a highlight reel of mostly good stuff going on in people's lives. If you are struggling, it does not make you weak, it makes you HUMAN. One damn day at a time. What we leave this earth with is not our physical - so focus on improving yourself from the inside out - the external will be a reflection of that. Too many words to tell y'all not to give up on your dreams. Don't be so hard on yourself. Would you talk to your best friend the way you talk down to yourself some days? Bless you if you read this I owe you a hug #neverquit #morethananumber"

Katie Anne - Katie Anne's Photos: ""I do not believe that any of us have dreams that were not given to us without the purpose of accomplishing those particular dreams. I do not care how far fetched it might appear to be... Here is what I know: that dream you are holding in your mind: it is POSSIBLE. Sometimes you cannot say you can do something - but you CAN say it is possible... In the process of working on your dreams, you will encur a lot of pain, defeat setbacks, defeat, etc. But in that process, you will discover some things about yourself that you never knew before. That you are more powerful than you ever thought possible. That you do not have to be a victim of your circumstances..." I have never shared this photo on the left. In fact, I remember taking it and thought I deleted it. Found it on my computer today. It was post #binge/rebound period where I put on 30lbs - weighing 170lbs - in only a couple months. BUT, I still had dreams of one day competing. I was told I would always be "too thick", my hamstrings were as flat as a pancake, I would ALWAYS binge/restrict. Do not let others determine your destiny. Each of us have dreams for a REASON. The dream of competing one day and being in the fitness realm was far fetched back then. Some of my dreams seem out of reach now. But they are POSSIBLE. #LESBROWNYALL #NeverQuit #YouCANOvercome #TeamNorton #TeamScience"

We don't really understand how anything works. Here, have some lobster.

The enigma behind America’s freak, 20-year lobster boom - Quartz: "Even more remarkable than sheer volume, though, is that this sudden sixfold surge has no clear explanation. A rise in sea temperatures, which has sped up lobster growth and opened up new coastal habitats for baby lobsters, is one likely reason. Another is that by plundering cod and other big fish in the Gulf of Maine, we’ve thinned out the predators that long kept lobster numbers in check. Both are strong hypotheses, yet no one’s sure we really understand what’s going on."

Sidenote: This kind of thing always reminds me of the hubris of things like "We can reconfigure climate change to our liking."  The sheer audacity of that given we we don't understand the simplest things very well.  See also: "complex adaptive systems" and unintended consequences.

Unintended consequences, "complex adaptive systems," and 'The Problem With International Development...'

The New Republic: "If someone is chronically malnourished, to pick just one example, you should give them some food, right? Duflo and Banerjee describe dozens of projects finding that, when you subsidize or give away food to poor people, they don’t actually eat more. Instead, they just replace boring foods with more interesting ones and remain, in the statistics at least, “malnourished.” In Udaipur, India, a survey found that poor people had enough money to increase their food spending by as much as 30 percent, but they chose to spend it on alcohol, tobacco, and festivals instead. Duflo and Banerjee interviewed an out-of-work Indonesian agricultural worker who had been under the food-poverty line for years, but had a TV in his house. You don’t need a Ph.D. to understand the underlying dynamic here: Cheap food is boring. In many developing countries, Duflo and Banerjee found that even the poorest people could afford more than 2,000 calories of staple foods every day. But given the choice between the fourth bowl of rice in one day and the first cigarette, many people opt for the latter...

The repeated “success, scale, fail” experience of the last 20 years of development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which they’re applied. It’s not that you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk...

This is the paradox: When you improve something, you change it in ways you couldn’t have expected. You can find examples of this in every corner of development practice. A project in Kenya that gave kids free uniforms, textbooks, and classroom materials increased enrollment by 50 percent, swamping the teachers and reducing the quality of education for everyone. Communities in India cut off their own water supply so they could be classified as “slums” and be eligible for slum-upgrading funding. I’ve worked in places where as soon as a company sets up a health clinic or an education program, the local government disappears—why should they spend money on primary schools when a rich company is ready to take on the responsibility?

...My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant. “That behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity. ... When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives...

The fancy academic term for this is “complex adaptive systems.” We all understand that every ecosystem, each forest floor or coral reef, is the result of millions of interactions between its constituent parts, a balance of all the aggregated adaptations of plants and animals to their climate and each other. Adding a non-native species, or removing one that has always been there, changes these relationships in ways that are too intertwined and complicated to predict.

According to Ben Ramalingam’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos, international development is just such an invasive species. Why Dertu doesn’t have a vaccination clinic, why Kenyan schoolkids can’t read, it’s a combination of culture, politics, history, laws, infrastructure, individuals—all of a society’s component parts, their harmony and their discord, working as one organism. Introducing something foreign into that system—millions in donor cash, dozens of trained personnel and equipment, U.N. Land Rovers—causes it to adapt in ways you can’t predict."

Dick Van Dyke Gets It.

Dance, Sing, Just 'Keep Moving,' Dick Van Dyke Tells Seniors : NPR: "Keep moving is the main thing. I think I reiterate three or four times in the book, "do not start going down the stairs sideways." It feels good on your knees but it throws the hips out and the back starts to go out, the next thing you know, you've fallen down and broken your hip. So even if it hurts a little, go down the stairs front-ways. It's more in my nature to be optimistic, I think. I'm one of those people who gets up on the right side of the bed in the morning. I get up and have a cup of coffee and go to the gym before I talk myself out of it because I will as anybody will...

On the hardest part of getting old 

Giving up the things that you enjoy doing. I can't handle the tennis court anymore. I can still run and dance and sing. You know, I made a habit of asking other people in their old age: of all the things you enjoyed doing when you were younger that you can't anymore, what do you miss? And some people mention golf or tennis. One woman said "I miss having lunch with the girls." But the people who said I wish I had made smarter business decisions, I think they're missing the point. The point is to enjoy. You have to pick what you enjoy doing, what fulfills you, what interests you. And I realize that's not possible for a lot of people. As Thoreau said, a lot of people are living lives of quiet desperation. But almost anyone can find that one immersing hobby or pastime that they love to do ... and someone."

"Most of the people you see going to work today LARPing an incredibly boring RPG called 'professionalism...'"

Cory SPOOKTorow (@doctorow) | Twitter:

Comics. Still Awesome.

Via "Wolverine," "Drax" & "Ms. Marvel's" Return Lead Marvel's November 2015 Solicitations - Comic Book Resources, "Dark Knight III," "Batman: Europa" Headline DC Comics' November 2015 Solicitations - Comic Book Resources, "Mystery Girl" #1, Rucka Writes "Dragon Age," & More in Dark Horse's December 2015 Solicitations - Comic Book Resources, "Secret Wars" Ends, "A-Force," "Totally Awesome Hulk" & More Debut in Marvel's December 2015 Solicitations - Comic Book Resources, & "Robin War" Breaks Out, "Batman Vs TMNT" Arrives in DC's December 2015 Solicitations - Comic Book Resources

"But if numbers are being used to generate a national panic or to institute policies that may cause more harm than good, then we need to assess them as dispassionately as possible..."

What we talk about when we talk about rape - LA Times: "The Justice Department and the FBI have expanded the definition of rape that existed decades ago. Today, it is defined as forced penetration of any orifice with any part of the body or an object. Under that definition, rates of rape are about 3% to 4% of college women and a slightly higher percentage of women not in college...

But if you add all of the behaviors now considered sexual assault — which include any unwanted acts such as "forced kissing," "fondling" and "rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes" — the number rises to that now-famous 20%. That's the figure President Obama used in his news conference launching the Justice Department's crusade against the campus rape "epidemic." It is also close to the number reported in the Assn. of American Universities' latest survey of sexual assault on U.S. colleges... 

On one level, numbers shouldn't matter: Rape is ugly, it's serious and can have devastating consequences for its victims. But if numbers are being used to generate a national panic or to institute university policies that may cause more harm than good, then we need to assess them as dispassionately as possible, without being accused of being "rape cultured" or supporting perpetrators...

Should young women be encouraged to believe that a clumsy act of fondling or kissing is the same thing, emotionally or physically, as forced penetration? For people who believe that misogyny and sexual violence are widespread and entrenched, the answer is yes; 20% seems like the right number for the percentage of assault victims. The culture today, they argue, encourages young men to feel sexually entitled to take advantage of women who are inebriated or otherwise unable to consent; look at those frat guys chanting, "No means yes."

For others, 3% or 4% feels like a more accurate number, supporting their argument that claims of rape are exaggerated in a political climate that supports any allegation a woman makes, and that invites women to turn unpleasant or regretted sexual encounters into assault charges. The culture today, they say, encourages women to avoid taking responsibility for their part in sexual encounters. Look at the language we use when we blame men for "getting a woman drunk." "Getting"? What is she, an empty vessel with no ability to say she's had enough?"

Our challenge is to accept what is valid in both perspectives. We can vigorously pursue the goals of justice for rape victims and fairness for accused perpetrators. We can understand that many acts of sexual assault are violent, and appreciate the subtleties of sexual communication that can create mischief and misery...

Some of these encounters are unambiguously coerced, but many are not. Sex researchers repeatedly find that people rarely say directly what they mean, and they often don't mean what they say. They find it difficult to say what they dislike because they don't want to hurt the other person's feelings. They may think they want intercourse and then change their minds. They may think they don't want intercourse and change their minds. They are, in short, engaging in what social psychologist Deborah Davis calls a "dance of ambiguity." Through vagueness and indirection, each party's ego is protected in case the other says no. Indirection saves a lot of hurt feelings, but it also causes problems. The woman really thinks the man should have known to stop, and he really thinks she gave consent.

Davis and her colleagues Guillermo Villalobos and Richard Leo have suggested that the primary reason for the many "he said/she said" reports that make the news is not that one side is lying. Rather, each partner is providing "honest false testimony" about what happened between them. Both parties believe they are telling the truth, but one or both may be wrong because of the unreliability of memory and perception, and because both are motivated to justify their actions...

By far, the most well-traveled pathway from uncomfortable sexual negotiations to honest false testimony is alcohol. For some women, alcohol is the solution to the sex decision: If they are inebriated, they haven't said yes, and if they haven't explicitly said yes, no one can call them  sluts. But for both parties, alcohol significantly impairs the cognitive interpretation of the other person's behavior. Men who are drunk are less likely to interpret nonconsent messages accurately, and women who are drunk convey less emphatic signs of refusal. And alcohol severely impairs both partners' memory of what actually happened...

When trying to reduce sexual assault, labeling all forms of sexual misconduct, including unwanted touches and sloppy kisses, as rape is alarmist and unhelpful. We need to draw distinctions between behavior that is criminal, behavior that is stupid and behavior that results from the dance of ambiguity."

"For every 167 women in four-year colleges, there were only 100 men."

Michelle Obama’s misguided girl power agenda | New York Post: "In the developing world it is true that girls are prevented from getting an education. They are too poor, their families need them to carry water to and from their homes, they have no sanitary facilities at school or there are Islamist lunatics trying to kill them or kidnap them when they go to school. But the girls in America are in an entirely different situation. In 2013, according to the Current Population Survey, 25- to 34-year-old women were 21 percent more likely to have a college degree than men and 48 percent more likely to have finished graduate school...

Even the most disadvantaged girls are more likely to get an education here than boys from similar circumstances. Richard Whitmire, author of “Why Boys Fail,” has argued that our discussions about the racial achievement gap and even the effects of poverty on educational attainment have masked the biggest disparities, which are between girls and boys. In an interview in the magazine Education Next, Whitmire cites a 2009 study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University that tracked the students who graduated from Boston public schools. For every 167 women in four-year colleges, there were only 100 men. But poverty wasn’t the problem — all the kids were coming from the same neighborhoods. “The study found that black females were five percentage points more likely to pursue further study after high school, including community colleges, four-year colleges and technical or vocational schools, than white males,” notes Whitmire. All of which is to say that girls in America don’t need a pep talk from the first lady anymore than, say, boys do."

The CIA's "benign cover-up." Say it with me, 'back and to the left.'

JFK Assassination: The Spy Chief Who Lied - POLITICO Magazine: "Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission...

According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots...

Initially stamped “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning it was not to be shared outside the agency or with foreign governments, Robarge’s report was originally published as an article in the CIA’s classified internal magazine, Studies in Intelligence, in September 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. The article, drawn from a still-classified 2005 biography of McCone written by Robarge, was declassified quietly last fall and is now available on the website of The George Washington University’s National Security Archive. In a statement to POLITICO, the CIA said it decided to declassify the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination,” including the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination...

Robarge’s article says that McCone, quickly convinced after the assassination that Oswald had acted alone and that there was no foreign conspiracy involving Cuba or the Soviet Union, directed the agency to provide only “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the Warren Commission. This portrait of McCone suggests that he was much more hands-on in the CIA’s dealings with the commission—and in the agency’s post-assassination scrutiny of Oswald’s past—than had previously been known. The report quotes another senior CIA official, who heard McCone say that he intended to “handle the whole (commission) business myself, directly.”

The report identifies other tantalizing information that McCone did not reveal to the commission, including evidence that the CIA might somehow have been in communication with Oswald before 1963 and that the spy agency had secretly monitored Oswald’s mail after he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959. The CIA mail-opening program, which was later determined to have been blatantly illegal, had the code name HTLINGUAL. “It would be surprising if the DCI [director of central intelligence] were not told about the program” after the Kennedy assassination, the report reads. “If not, his subordinates deceived him. If he did know about HTLINGUAL reporting on Oswald, he was not being forthright with the commission—presumably to protect an operation that was highly compartmented and, if disclosed, sure to arouse much controversy.”"

And I stand by what I wrote years ago - Relaxed Focus: The main thing that convinces me JFK's assassination was a conspiracy.: "The sniper's nest is on the upper left side of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, facing down Houston St.  Kennedy is shot after the turn onto Elm St is made and proceeding away from the Depository.  Even with my minimal firearms training at the Academy and in the Marines, the story doesn't add up. No, the supposed shot that Oswald made isn't an impossible one [though I can't speak to the "X number of shots in Y number of seconds" theories] but here's what makes absolutely no sense at all - and you can see it on the map above. 

From a shooter's perspective, to wait until he's driven past you, moving away... when you've got a perfect headshot/killshot as the car makes the slow right turn onto and proceeds down Houston St makes no sense whatsover. Waiting till he's gone past you only makes sense if you're coordinating fire with other shooters and moving the target into a killzone - the 'triangulation of fire' theory you hear about from folks who posit another shooter on the Grassy Knoll or elsewhere."

If you're the only shooter and you're in the School Book Depository, you absolutely take the shot when the car is on Houston.  Even if they try to accelerate out of the kill zone, they're driving right to you and are easy pickings.

"...as soon as you realize that the model you've been looking at maybe isn't so firm as you thought... Then you're free."

President Obama: Wizard or Failure? | Scott Adams Blog: "Russia is moving into Old Syria. Iran already owns the parts of Old Iraq that ISIS and the Kurds do not. Israel fears that the nuclear deal with Iran is a mistake of unthinkable proportions. The data suggests that President Obama is a total failure when it comes to the Middle East. Or… he is one of the most gifted wizards of persuasion and strategy our generation has ever seen. The data fits both interpretations. You already know the interpretation that says Obama failed. Allow me to give you another interpretation – one that isn’t necessarily true – but happens to fit the data...

The Master Wizard filter says that President Obama – magnificent bastard and Commander in Chief – just suckered Russia and Iran into the quicksand while taking The United States out of an endless and unwinnable fight. And … doomed ISIS in the process. The United States can’t defeat ISIS militarily because doing so would require killing too many civilians. Russia and Iran will have fewer problems in that regard because they control their media and their leaders don’t need to ask permission. And let’s say you want to build a virtual wall around ISIS to contain them. You would need a substantial military power to guard the coast. You need Russia.  Right where they are deploying. The Master Wizard filter says President Obama has a winning plan for eradicating ISIS at the lowest cost for Americans. America’s frenemies have now encircled ISIS, and the American media with their freedom of the press will not be there to watch what happens next. ISIS is reportedly planting landmines around captured cities to keep the civilian population from escaping. They expected the United States to avoid bombing population centers.  They were right. But they they did not expect the United States to turn over the fight to Russia and Iran. ISIS is done. "

Dilbert's Scott Adams on Politics, Philosophy, Hypnosis, and "Failing Towards Success" - Reason.com: ""You can defend an entirely different view of the world using the same data that's used to defend the standard model. So whenever I can do that, I'm so there," says Scott Adams. "Because as soon as you realize that the model you've been looking at maybe isn't so firm as you thought... Then you're free.""

"...having more guns in circulation has not led to higher rates of gun murders... which is one of the reasons why popular sentiment has not turned against gun rights.

Here It Comes: Wash Post Writer Calls for "A Gun-Free Society" - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "...what is the status quo with guns? Over the past several decades at least, most states have liberalized their gun laws. It's easier to own guns, generally, and to carry them in a wider variety of circumstances, too. And over the same time period—and this is key—gun violence has declined to historic lows. In other words, the status quo, while far from perfect (as recent mass shootings and crime-wave reports from Chicago and other cities attest), is good and getting better. In fact, according the most recent government statistics, violent crime, a category including murder, rape, and armed robbery, is far below what it was in the mid-1990s. Pew Research and others have documented this (see accompanying charts). The plain fact is that having more guns in circulation has not led to higher rates of gun murders. People get that, which is one of the reasons why popular sentiment has not turned against gun rights.

...Such data will not end the suffering and grieving of parents and loved ones in Oregon who were touched by the latest shooting. But it should help people in the media and the government understand that they are overreacting when they inveigh that the only way forward is via zero-tolerance for guns. Zero-tolerance has never worked in any other context and the idea that gun prohibition in a country as large and gun-friendly as America (like it or not) is several steps past delusional."

"No, no, relax. It's alright. I speak Irish."