Category: Uncategorized

Huckleberry watches the cows jump up and down:

All the women working out with us in the free weight area are incredibly fit and slender, yet when the step classes get out, we watch nothing short of a brigade of bovines meandering from the classroom through to the exit, most having taken the classes for years with no visable effect.

It never ceases to amaze me how many clueless women will say that they don’t want to lift weights because they don’t want to get big and muscular, when with one or two seriously hard-core exceptions, the women in the free weight room have bodies that resemble fitness models and swimsuit models, not the Governator in his prime.

For the most part, women can’t get big and muscular without going on steroids or having abnormally high testosterone levels. Spacebunny has been lifting hard and heavy for ten years, but even benching her own weight is an iffy proposition. She has lovely definition, but absolutely no bulk whatsoever.

I only know two women who can bench 135, one is a champion powerlifter and the other is the most extreme gym rat I have ever met. Both of them are slim, very attractive women, although the ripped contours of their arms and legs betrays their unusual muscular development.

A simple glance at one of the women’s fitness magazines should be enough to dispel this common myth. The fitness babes always spend far more time in the weight room than they do doing cardio.

Kathleen forgets that Science regards the What, not the Why:

“If the human race ever exterminates itself through war, it will be because of ideas in scientific textbooks, not religious or ideological texts.”

Right. I can see it now. Nations attacking each other in the crusade for String Theory … martyrs sacrificing themselves in the holy name of the Genome Project.

The ideas to which I was referring refer to the concept of the atom and its splitting, of biochemistry, biogenetics and their deadlier potential applications. The religions of which Harris and Dawkins complain have been around for millenia; the danger of self-extinction which frightens them is entirely the result of science.

As the history of warfare and secular democide demonstrates quite clearly, even a complete absence of all religion would not appreciably reduce this risk.

I knew my chances were somewhat slim, based on the matchups. Only a week after beating up the first-place team, nearly all my starters were on the road and facing tough defenses. I did what I could using up the last of my pickups to grab Ryan Moats and start him instead of Willie Parker, Lamont Jordan or Michael Bennet. He scored, Steve Smith came through again and it proved to be wise to sit Bledsoe, Rothlisberger, (and to dump Brad Johnson) in favor of picking up and starting David Garrard, but all that wasn’t close to being enough.

I knew the WB’s Seahawks-heavy team had an easy matchup, but they’d had an equally easy matchup the week before and only scored 24 points. So there was hope. But then Cooley, of all people, went off, the Seahawks blew up, and even if Marvin Harrison hadn’t dropped three potential TD passes, I wouldn’t have gotten within ten. It’s 48-22 right now, so unless the Atlanta defense scores nine touchdowns, I am done.

It was an unexpectedly good season and finishing 11-4 is no shame. But in the end, it’s just another year without a ring.

MG sees and hears no evil

Beyond the certain measures of the Patriot Act, how has the president violated his oath?

So the president is spying on Americans. Big deal. What is your alternative? I know that this war is real. I wonder if you do. Granted, I am curious as to why the president has not secured the borders, but I know how the enemy works, and I know what they are capable of. I wonder if you do. So, how is the government, and in particular, the President of the United States, is supposed to defend this nation and the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic? Can’t he direct intelligence assets to spy on Americans? Why not? If what these agencies are doing is not going to be used for prosecution, but instead going to be used for counterespionage and counterterrorism, why not?

George Bush has violated his oath by supporting the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, by signing the campaign finance reform bill and by taking no steps to stop the immigration invasion.

My alternative to spying illegally on Americans? Pretty simple. Don’t spy. One does not defend Americans by destroying America. It is laughable to assert that a government which has knowingly allowed an actual invasion of millions of immigrants should be permitted any leeway when it suddenly claims that it needs to violate the rights of American citizens to deal with a problem it caused.

This reasoning is ludicrous. One might as easily argue: “So the president is killing Jews, big deal, I know this war is real.” No amount of domestic spying is going to prevent the hundreds or thousands of potential terrorists the government has allowed to enter the country from doing whatever they decide to do when they decide to act; one need merely read the reports from Israel or Iraq to ascertain that.

The reason that George Bush wants the government to be able to spy on Americans is to expand central government control over the population. Why? Because that is the nature of central government, to expand whenever and whereever possible. These oft-stated concerns about terrorism are mere window dressing, meant to offer cover for government agencies and officials in the event of another attack so they can claim that they were doing everything possible to prevent it and so should not be held responsible for failing to do so.

BT offers a theory:

I am married to a man that has no respect for women other than his own mother. I have come to believe that this is very common. It seems that men 30 and under have an extreme contempt for women. If a woman is more sucessful than them then they are jealous, and if a woman is less sucessful it is to be hung over her head. I am in no way a feminist, actually I was raised in a southern home in which only my father worked, but I am confronted with examples of what creates feminists everyday. While I believe that feminist = male sexist, I also believe that feminist are women with the extreme competitive nature of men. I do not believe respect is the issue I believe the problem lies in the competiveness of men. If you ask a so called sexist man why he has contempt towards women he will imediately list why he believes he is better than the women he is confronted with on a daily basis, and vice versa for feminist. So, maybe a better article would be “The Competitive Nature Between Men and Women, and Why it Exsists.”

BT makes an interesting point and makes an interesting observation here. And in fact, the two are most likely connected. It’s interesting how women often assert that feminists are created – presumably by oppressive or patriarchal male behavior – and yet even those observing that it is the younger men who are far more contemptuous of women than their “sexist” forefathers fail to note how this contempt has been created.

The young man’s attitude towards most women can be boiled down to this: “you’re equal to me, but you suck.” Unlike older men, who were taught to regard women as the weaker sex, young men have been indoctrinated to believe that women are the same as they are. So, a woman who is weaker, more emotional, less sexually driven, less ambitious or otherwise less capable in some significant way – at least one of which applies to almost almost all women – is treated the way an inferior man is treated, with open contempt.

One of the many ironies of feminism is how it has replaced the patriarchal male who believes that women deserve to be treated better because they are the weaker sex with the equalitarian male who believes that women deserve to be treated worse because they are weak individuals.

A few thoughts while at the gym this morning:

1. Recognize that your preferences will change regularly.

Right now, I hate doing bench – which is weird, I usually love it – and I dislike pull-ups too, but I like doing curls and dumbbell shoulder press. I LOVE dumbbell shoulder press, if you do only one exercise this Christmas season, do that. So, if I’m really not in the mood to get out of the house, I tell myself that if I go, I don’t have to do any of the exercises I don’t want to do. That way, you get something done and you keep your fitness momentum going even if your workout is sub-optimal.

You don’t have to worry about becoming a misshapen freak, because soon enough, your preferences will change again and you’ll be wondering why you hated one thing while being unable to figure out what it was about another thing that you liked so much. Except for dumbbell shoulder press. That’s like sex. Even when it’s bad, it’s still really good.

2. Set a specific short-term goals and make a game of it.

I’m not talking about general targets, like hitting a certain weight or waist size. That’s too nebulous, it’s not active enough. Pick something that is related to an exercise you enjoy at the moment and hammer on it. And the weirder, the better. Right now, I’m into curls, so I set a goal of curling Spacebunny ten times without creatine. That seemed optimistic at first, but only a few weeks later I’m within striking distance, having nailed it eight times. It’s now a race to see which will happen first; hitting my goal or blowing out my left wrist.

I hit ten reps just below her weight today, so I’m thinking about asking her to go on a bread-and-water diet until Tuesday, then weighing her and declaring victory.

3. Do something every day. Don’t do anything that requires a day to recover.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time between sets. Watch some football. Read a book. The Perfect Aryan Male and I used to do seven-hour Saturday workouts, although only two and one-half hours were spent actually working out. The rest was watching football, steaming, hitting the sauna, having drinks and hitting on the waitresses at the club. Sure, it wasn’t exactly the most efficient workout, but it was effective and at the end of the day, we’d still spent a monstrous amount of time on the weights and whatnot.

4. Be reasonable about cutting down on your food intake.

Instead of eating nothing, decide what you want to eat and then cut it in half. If you feel like seconds, drink a glass of water or make a protein shake. Those shakes will fill you up, especially if you’ve just eaten half a sandwich. Set aside Friday evenings for a cheat day, do a big Friday night workout and then pig out. I recommend Khan’s Mongolian Barbeque for Minnesotans. I don’t think anyone there will ever forget Big Chilly, all 6’1″, 165 pounds of him, outeating the U.S national shotput and discus champion there.

5. Free weights are the key

Cardio is great. Cardio is necessary. But if you really want to get lean, you need to build up your muscle mass. Muscle burns energy even when you are sleeping; TPAM once infuriated a girl who was trying to get him to go for a run by proving to her that he burned more calories sitting on the couch watching TV than she did while running. Of course, he has triceps the size of my head, so you may have to actually go for a run once a week.

6. A recumbent exercise bike and Madden is the ultimate workout combo.

But you have to be careful. I once got a little too caught up in my season and played three games straight. When I tried to get up, it felt as if my legs had been set on fire. I finally had to roll off the bike and lie there until the muscles in my legs stopped spasming.

Even if I probably didn’t:

Gen. James L. Jones perceived a problem with Marines’ fighting image when he became Marine Corps commandant in 1999. As a young officer during the Vietnam War, he had heard that the North Vietnamese were more fearful of the Republic of Korea’s marines than they were of his U.S. Marines. A rumor had spread among the communists that all Korean marines knew tae kwon do.

Gen. Jones decided that the Marine Corps would develop its own martial-arts program, in part so that the enemy would know that American Marines are as adept at fighting with their hands and feet as they are with rifles and mortars. In 1999, he turned to the director of the Marine Corps’ training and education division — Major Gen. Thomas S. Jones (no relation) — to start a fighting school.

Three years earlier, the previous commandant had been at my house and was torn between giving me a hard time about my earring – a longstanding tradition – and giving Spacebunny a hard time about her belly ring. After the usual liturgy about manhood, the Marines and how my failure to join the latter was indicative of the questionable nature of the former, I pointed out that while there was no doubting his ability to convince thousands of men to do his dirty work, the classical and historical definition of manhood revolved around single combat, and the point of his thrust was entirely ironic because he couldn’t dream of taking me on his best day, even if he had the benefit of the full flush of his youth.

Hoist on his own petard, the general explained that the USMC was not only the finest military force in history, but also trained its warriors in the most deadly hand-to-hand techniques, techniques that would be far too dangerous in displaying to a presumably fragile civilian. I expressed a degree of doubt that there were any lethal techniques taught in six weeks of Basic which would be unfamiliar to anyone having been through five years of full-contact martial arts, including shorin ryu karate, wing chun kung fu and kali.

It was mutually agreed that there was only one way to settle the matter. About fifteen seconds later, the commandant saw fit to reconsider and deem my point to be a worthy one, inasmuch his nose was threatened with becoming intimately familiar with the wooden floor and his movement was arrested by a neck-lock that required only six or eight inches of movement to become a neck-snap. Whereupon I released him and we shook hands.

It is no exaggeration to say that the commandant was not only a brilliant soldier, but he is one of the best of men, and I like to think that if General Jones ever happened to ask his opinion about the utility of the martial arts for the Corps, he might have smiled to himself before affirming that, yes, he could see where such training might be of some small use.

Anonymous casts aspersions:

anybody that believes the NY times story . Is an offical fool, according to offical sources who wrote the story as an offical news report.

In response, I offer the following quote:

President Bush said Saturday he personally has authorized a secret eavesdropping program in the U.S. more than 30 times since the Sept. 11 attacks and he lashed out at those involved in publicly revealing the program. “This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security,” he said in a radio address delivered live from the White House’s Roosevelt Room.

I am more skeptical about the New York Times than nearly anyone I know. However, being skeptical does not mean automatically discounting everything it publishes, especially when a report is in line with other things I know to be true.

Jazz has a request:

Your assessment, please, of Sam Harris’s talk at Idea City ’05 ? http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samharris/television/

Instead of listening to the guy’s talk, I read the excerpt from his book, “The End of Faith”, which is available at the site. (I prefer to analyze a person’s thinking as revealed in their written words, as it is more difficult to hide errant logic behind rhetoric in writing.) As I mentioned to Jazz, I’m extremely underwhelmed by the guy, given that he clearly has done minimal research and appears to be the sort of idealogue who isn’t one to let demonstrable facts get in the way of his theories. I found three major errors in the first nine paragraphs alone:

“A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.”

This is true only if that glance at history happens to be an uneducated one focused only on the Crusades or the current global jihad. This idea reveals nothing but an ignorance of military history on the part of the person putting it forth, as the overwhelming majority of all wars in history have nothing whatsoever to do with religion. This is obvious whether one examines the history of the great nations, the great wars or the great individuals. Alexander the Great was not motivated by religion, but the desire for personal fame, Julius Caesar did not conquer Gaul because he wished to bring them to the worship of Nike, obviously, and Winston Churchill did not demand blood, sweat and tears from the English people on behalf of the Anglican church. As I’ve shown, religion has historically accounted for only 10 percent of the wars on record, and most of those were caused by Islamic expansion.

If the human race ever exterminates itself through war, it will be because of ideas in scientific textbooks, not religious or ideological texts. War and religion have been with mankind since the beginning, and only the mixed blessings of reason – science and technology – offer Man the ability to completely destroy himself. Harris even touches on this later; ironically, this leads him to draw the illogical conclusion that mankind should preserve that which endangers it and eliminate that which doesn’t.

“Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.”

This is a baseless assertion which is demonstrably and completely untrue. The very concept of tolerance arose in an overwhelmingly Christian society, and as atheists are so fond of pointing out, the Golden Rule is not unique to Christianity. Just as the Christian God is willing to tolerate the inevitability of people being led astray, the vast majority of Christians fully accept that each individual is responsible for the eternal destiny of his own soul.

“Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture.”

What culture does this joker live in? This is provably absurd. George Bush, a powerful national figure who appears to be a nominal Christian from a fading mainstream denomination at best, is viciously and repeatedly criticized for his professed faith, in the national media and countless private circles around the country. For a specific example disproving the postulated “taboo”, there’s the famous criticism of the Washington Post characterizing Christians as being “poor, uneducated and easy to command.”

From this sample, I conclude that there is absolutely no reason to take Sam Harris or his book seriously. He is pseudo-intellectual pretender at best; more likely he is simply another anti-religious intellectual fraud in the tradition of Richard Dawkins.

Vegetius hates women, with reason:

So question for all ? how do you avoid becoming a woman hater when your ex wife……..
embezzeled thousands from her job.. not once but twice… left me and the kids hanging once before and caused me to have to relocate 2000 miles away cause everyone in town knew about it….front page of the newspaper and all.

Family no longer talks to me…. once again I find myself self employed holding my own raising two teens.. they finally put her ass in prison !!!

she was so hateful, grew to be 300 pounds plus… sex ?? yeah right. shopped till she dropped that is when she wasn’t sitting in front of the tv watching that god forsakken “sex and the city”

My first reaction is to wonder how to rectify the name with the grammar… but I suppose that’s beside the point. The answer to his question is that to blame all women for the fact that you are such a poor judge of women that you picked an impressively bad one is simply illogical. There is no more justification for this than there is for the man-haters who hate all men because their male gym teacher gave them personal sex education in sixth-grade.

Most women aren’t hateful. Most women aren’t embezzlers. Most women aren’t sociopaths, and the mere fact of your long-term proximity to one shouldn’t blind you to the fact that they’re not.

I have reached the conclusion that many men and women are simply incapable of successfully selecting their mates for the long term. They forget that their friends know them very well, that people tend to conform to certain archetypes, and that it is not necessary to be exchanging bodily fluids to quickly get a handle on what lies beneath the surface of a person in whom their friend is interested, while placing far too much trust in their own ability to ignore their hormones and seriously consider the other individual.

I would not have considered marrying Spacebunny had not men and women who knew me well and whose opinions I trusted been extremely supportive of my doing so. They knew me very well, they had become reasonably well acquainted with her and spent a considerable amount of time around the two of us while we were dating. In fact, several people commented how closely her personality resembled that of my two best male friends; their personalities tend to compliment mine rather than resemble it.

The opinion of my female friends was particularly important to me, as it is always easier to spot the hidden flaws in a member of your sex than in an attractive member of the opposite one. In fact, as a result of the varying success of various marriages I have seen, I am beginning to think that no one should continue dating, let alone marry, anyone that one’s best two male and two female friends do not approve of.

Now, here’s a question that should prove informative. Of the divorced men and women here, how many were seriously warned not to marry their ex-husband or ex-wife by someone close to them?