Vox Popoli

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?

Grendelizer is frustrated with the little piggy that won’t:

She says she’s tried “working out” and it doesn’t work. I beg her to just try it “my way” and see what happens. She says that’s just not “her way.”

If that’s the case, she’s just a lazy ass and harsher measures are required. There is not a body in the world that working out does not work for. There is no chance that anyone, at any age, can go through a serious workout routine, six days a week for six weeks, without seeing visible changes to the body. Give her consequences… not a relationship ultimatum or anything, just discover that you are suddenly too lazy to bother providing the things she wants from you.

Then when she wants to know why she doesn’t have any money for buying clothes or knickknacks while you’re driving a new Porsche, tell her that’s just your way. Geese, ganders and sauce, don’t you know.

The idea that the loving Christian example aka martyr will inspire a desire for positive change in everyone is a farce. It makes no sense at all! Yes, it can work, but that’s a far cry from saying that it will work. Think about it for a second… there were no shortage of individuals who rejected Jesus Christ himself and refused to change their ways when he came in person and told them to.

If an individual won’t even consider changing their unacceptable ways despite reasonable and repeated requests on your part, you’ve got two choices. Accept the status quo or up the ante. Since I could not care less about the sociopaths and psychopaths who consider the feelings of others to be of no import whatsoever, I tend to favor the latter.

I’m always amused when a slovenly woman gets divorced and then miraculously finds the motivation to get herself in shape and make herself attractive again. The women’s magazines portray this as some sort of revenge, of making the ex-husband see what he’s missing, but I can only imagine that far from gnashing his teeth in regret, the ex-husband is laughing, since he knows that when some other poor sucker might fall for it, she’s going to drop the effort and go to pot again at the first opportunity.

We are intricate beings composed of body, mind and soul. If one goes, they all go, and effort is required in all three.

The New York Times finally gets around to outing a traitor:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches….

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting.

Impeach the bastard now. He’s a traitor, every bit as disloyal to the American people and their Constitution as his predecessor and his likely successor. If it truly was necessary, there’d be no need to do it in secret.

Richard Nixon resigned after getting caught spying on his political foes. Bush should resign for spying on the American people.

The Pan-Galactic is rightly amused only a day after questioning the verity of geological “science”:

Key parts of a landmark paper from South Korea’s most renowned stem cell scientist were fabricated and the researcher is seeking to have the work withdrawn, a close collaborator told South Korean media on Thursday.

The daily newspaper Hankyoreh and three South Korean television networks quoted Roh Sung-il as saying that he, stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk and another co-author of the landmark 2005 Science paper on tailor-made stem cells had notified the journal they were withdrawing the paper.

It would be edifying, I think, were someone to write the Encyclopedia of Scientific Fraud. That way, when the Darwinist faithful get rightous about the sanctity of science and scientists as they are occasionally wont to do, one would have something to drop on their toes.

The scientific method is a great boon to mankind, but there is as much fraud that goes on in its name as there is in Christianity.

CNN/SI has Vikings-Packers as only their #7 longtime NFL rivalry, just above Bengals-Browns and below Broncos-Raiders. Please. Ask any Packers fan, there is no way they’d rather beat the Bears than the Vikings – and yet that’s at #2!

Now, Cowboys-Redskins, I’ll give you. But Vikes-Pack is second only to that. Heck, I’d put Cowboys-Steelers above most of the “rivalries” that they listed there. They did, however, get the top new school rivalry right, as Patriots-Colts has become increasingly interesting. I would LOVE to see New England knock off a 17-0 Indianapolis team in this year’s AFC Championship game.

Being in varying degrees of proximity to a relationship or three which appear to be foundering – or have already sunk into the depths – there’s a common theme I’ve noted. Perhaps the most important is that while both sexes are more than a little confused about their proper roles in a functioning marriage, it’s the wives who seem particularly out to sea with regards to their priorities.

It might help, I think, for some women to remember what their vows are centered on, and the special role they have taken in their husband’s lives. Seriously, with the priorities I’ve seen some women display, I can only wonder what job they thought they were signing up for.

If you worry more about what you’re going to serve a man for dinner than how you’re going to rock his world later, you’re not his wife, you’re his cook.

If you spend more time obsessing about the last time you cleaned the house than the last time you had sex, you’re not his wife, you’re his cleaning lady.

If the children are always your top priority at all times, then you’re not his wife, you’re the nanny – or maybe just the day care center.

It’s not that these things are unimportant, but while they’re important, they are properly secondary concerns in a marriage. Your husband didn’t vow before God and Man to be faithful to your cooking and to never eat at another restaurant, after all. And sure, there will be times you’re not in the mood or whatever, but you might want to consider this: would you consider that reasonable grounds for him refusing to pay the mortage or the health insurance? Sex, like love, is a choice. If you’re always waiting for things to magically happen and sweep you away, you need to grow up and quit sleeping with the stuffed unicorn with the rainbows on it.

From what I’ve seen, there’s no shortage of men and women who simply don’t take marriage very seriously and refuse to accept any responsibilities within it. But failing to accept them doesn’t mean they don’t exist and that there won’t be consequences for doing so.

(As for those pathetic women who can find four hours to watch sitcom sexcapades on TV every night but can’t find an hour for the real thing, you’d be wise to buy your husband a subscription to the porn site of his preference and budget for a call girl once a month if you don’t want to wind up collecting cats and alimony.)

There’s a reason why call girls make considerably more money per hour than cooks, cleaners and day care workers, after all. This is because the service they provide is significantly more important to men.

I don’t condone my acquaintances who leave their frigid wives and move on to friendlier climes with a free-at-last smile on their faces, but it’s certainly no mystery why they would do so, leaving behind a woman who laments how she can’t imagine what went wrong when she was such a perfect cook, housekeeper and mother.

God is good. He knew what he was doing when he gave us Chinese takeout, the Roomba and early bedtimes.