30 January, 2019

Hacking strength: Gaining muscle with least resistance


In my current routine, each day has a different upper-body theme: arms; shoulders and back; and chest. I do a few leg exercises on each lifting day.
I saw good results on just 3 days a week.
I'll consider a new routine if I plateau and still need more strength.
While gaining weight, I aim for about 20 sets of 8-12 reps to failure.
While cutting fat, I aim for about 15 sets of 4-8 reps to failure.
Listen to your body.
If it can handle more sets, do more sets. If you're sore days later, do less.
On each lifting day, pick an assortment of exercises that target the muscle group for that day, with some variation week to week.

28 January, 2019

Only after Mats died, did his parents understand the value of the time he spent playing games / Først da Mats var død, forsto foreldrene verdien av gamingen hans



https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/xl/forst-da-mats-var-dod_-forsto-foreldrene-verdien-av-gamingen-hans-1.14197198

Robert og Trude sørget over sønnens ensomme liv i rullestolen. Men da Mats døde, tente venner over hele Europa lys for ham.

26 January, 2019

The Odd Way We Announce for President Now

Because they know a candidate now is a mood. Not a thought, a stand or a statement, but a mood.
They do this because they want to seem unpretentious, relatable. “I’m just like you.”
But here is our secret: We would like someone better than us.
As they demystify themselves they further demystify the office they seek. If they win it they will have made their life harder by lowering their own stature. Familiarity breeds contempt.

24 January, 2019

The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives

Moreover, the congressmen were going to need money for future campaigns, and they had learned that a good way to get it—in some cases the only way—was through Lyndon Johnson. “Gratitude,” I was to write, “is an emotion as ephemeral in Washington as elsewhere, but . . . not merely gratitude but an emotion perhaps somewhat stronger and more enduring—self-interest—dictated that they be on good terms with him.” In that single month, Lyndon Johnson, thirty-two years old, just three years in the House, had established himself as a congressman with a degree of influence over other congressmen, as a congressman who had gained his first toehold on the national power he was to wield for the next thirty years. For someone interested in the sources of political power, as I was, those boxes in the Johnson Library contained incontrovertible evidence of the use to which economic power could be put to create political power.

How To Be Successful

You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.
I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.
One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. It’s also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you’re young.

23 January, 2019

Republican Senator Joni Ernst Says She Was Raped in College

Joni Ernst discussed her marriage and divorce with Bloomberg in August and at greater length in a phone call Tuesday night, when she also first disclosed her rape as a college student. At times as she described her past, Ernst cried so hard that she was barely intelligible.
For most of high school, Ernst says she didn’t date. “I was the smart one, who earned the 4.0, the sweet girl that takes care of everybody,” she said.
She entered into a relationship with someone who was “very abusive. He was physically and sexually abusive,” she said. One night while she was in college at Iowa State University, he raped her at his home, then later threatened to kill himself if she broke up with him, she said. She called the campus sexual assault counseling center’s hotline, and ended the relationship. She didn’t report the attack to police, she said.
Later in life, she volunteered at the counseling center without disclosing that she had once been a client. Her volunteer work was part of her official biography during her 2014 Senate campaign, but when asked about it she said only that she cared for survivors of sexual assault -- not that she was one herself.

22 January, 2019

I'm Sarah Kliff, Senior Policy Correspondent at Vox. I spent the last year reading 1,182 emergency bills to expose the nightmare that is hospital billing in the US. AMA!

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/aiqg0j/im_sarah_kliff_senior_policy_correspondent_at_vox/

For the past 15 months, I’ve asked Vox readers to submit emergency room bills to our database. I’ve read emergency room bills from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. I’ve looked at bills from big cities and from rural areas, from patients who are babies and patients who are elderly. I’ve even submitted one of my own emergency room bills for an unexpected visit this past summer.

21 January, 2019

I Was a 4-Year-Old Trapped in a Teenager’s Body

https://www.thecut.com/2019/01/precocious-puberty-patrick-burleigh.html
I have the records of my first visit to NIH. I was 3, but my height and weight were those of a 7-year-old. My testosterone level was between 300 and 500 nanograms per deciliter, within the normal range for a 13-year-old boy. (The testosterone level of a typical 3-year-old is around 15 nanograms per deciliter.) I had a slight mustache and would soon have minor acne. The doctors also noted I was prone to aggressive outbursts; that same year, after an argument with my mother, I punched my hand through a glass door and severed the ulnar artery in my wrist, nearly losing the use of my right hand.

C.S. Lewis on twitter

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/170990-suppose-one-reads-a-story-of-filthy-atrocities-in-the

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”


― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Internet wrong, Nathan Phillips right

https://twitter.com/lisasharper/status/1087174914673655809
I've been watching videos all day. I have one thing to say (in a bunch of tweets, so hold on): The videos BACK UP/STRENGTHEN Mr. Nathan Phillips' account of what happened toward the conclusion of the #IndigenousPeoplesMarch on Saturday. They also reveal how it all happened. 1/

The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros

Finkelstein had long been studying the big political trends, and he settled on simple issues that could do the most damage. In the end, he noticed, it usually comes down to the same concerns: drugs, crime, and race. These are the issues that create the most political division, he wrote in a memo to the Nixon White House in 1970.
Finkelstein’s goal was to polarize the electorate as much as possible, to pitch each side against the other. The fuel: fear. “The danger has to be presented as coming from the Left,” a 25-year-old Finkelstein advised Nixon.
Whoever doesn’t attack first will be beaten, he argued. And Finkelstein made things personal. Every campaign needs an enemy to defeat. He developed negative campaigning into a technique he called “rejectionist voting” — to demonize the enemy so much that even the laziest of voters would want to get out and vote, just to reject them.

20 January, 2019

Bottom line though? The popular narrative of what occurred in this confrontation is inaccurate

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/ai0qcf/covington_catholic_longer_video_shows_start_of/eekj6mk/
https://np.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/ahybt7/full_video_of_what_transpired_regarding_catholic/eejbe59/

49:55 Its hard to tell but I think the Black Israeli group has sensed it's losing it's audience and begin moving in closer to the MAGA kids. The Narrator at least is doing his best to be provocative. I have no love for the MAGA movement, but this is inexcusably looking for a fight at this point. The kids look amused or bemused depending.
Around 1:00 it's become noticable that the Black Israelites have an entire ring around them of people interested, and are galvanized further by the attention. Now to be fair, there is also someone on a hoverboard in close proximity, which just kind of makes the whole thing rather surreal and could also be helping draw the crowd. Some are angry, most are just...amused.
Around 1:08 the crowd starts chanting something back. If anyone wants to clarify it for me, that'd be nice.
1:10 some kid from the MAGA kid crowd darts down to the main pavillion to cheers and proceeds to strip off his upper clothes, to much cheering. I think they just gave a school team cheer?
1:12 the crowd is really starting to thicken to the right. At this point Nathan (The native american tribal leader) has come up from the right and put himself and small group of people between the Black Israelites and the MAGA kids. While this is happening some sort of chant/cheer is being lead here where the MAGA kids are getting more energized.
As the drumming continues, the MAGA kids start circling around him, but I can''t really tell if they're mocking him, or just really into the drumming mixed with the chanting. It kinda has the same absurd energy as a pep rally.
It 'could' be construde by 1:14 that they're doing some parody of Native American chanting. From the Narrator's view, the kids have entirely surrounded Nathan.

Journalist in Ghana who exposed soccer corruption shot dead

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — An investigative journalist in Ghana who helped expose a high-ranking official at world soccer body FIFA as corrupt was shot dead by gunmen on a motorbike as he drove home alone at night, police said Thursday.
His employers said he was assassinated.
Ahmed Hussein-Suale was killed late Wednesday, shot twice in the chest and once in the neck at close range while driving in the suburb of Accra where he lived. He died immediately, according to police.
Tiger Eye PI, the investigative journalism house Hussein-Suale worked for, said it had the hallmarks of a professional hit.

18 January, 2019

I’m Prepared to Talk About the Things I Did in Iraq. Are People Ready to Listen?



https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/iraq-marine-phraselator.html
Later that morning, more than a hundred Marines assembled in a final unit formation behind a large brick building immediately across the New River from a demolitions range. Before we were dismissed for the last time as a unified group, some Marines across the river detonated a substantial charge. We all visibly flinched, some of us dropping to the ground, all of us conditioned to dodge the shrapnel and fire that invariably accompanied loud blasts in Iraq. We looked around at one another and slowly stood back up, laughing at ourselves but sharing a level of understanding that has since been elusive.
Ironically, that common understanding is both the thing we most need from each other as veterans and the thing that keeps some of us from effectively reconnecting with civilians, a critical factor as we become civilians ourselves. Sajer’s notion of remaining separated from the human condition, though he claimed not to feel regret, is nothing less than self-imposed exile. Just as I felt when I stood before that Iraqi policeman, it is my responsibility to say something, to find some sort of connection. I just ask that you not get frustrated or awkward and turn away if the translation comes haltingly, or if the truth proves to be more than you wanted.

15 January, 2019

Startup Playbook

A word of warning about choosing to start a startup: It sucks! One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we get from YC founders is it’s harder than they could have ever imagined, because they didn’t have a framework for the sort of work and intensity a startup entails. Joining an early-stage startup that’s on a rocketship trajectory is usually a much better financial deal.
On the other hand, starting a startup is not in fact very risky to your career—if you’re really good at technology, there will be job opportunities if you fail. Most people are very bad at evaluating risk. I personally think the riskier option is having an idea or project you’re really passionate about and working at a safe, easy, unfulfilling job instead.
To have a successful startup, you need: a great idea (including a great market), a great team, a great product, and great execution.

14 January, 2019

Some US government websites won’t load after HTTPS certificates expire during shutdown

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/11/shutdown-government-websites-https-certificates-expire/
Most major government websites aren’t down or likely to go down any time soon. Most government certificates aren’t set to expire for many more months. Also, any government website hosted on cloud.gov, search.gov or federalist.18f.gov won’t get certificate errors, as these domains automatically renew their certificates every three months with Let’s Encrypt.
Until the government opens up again, don’t expect these websites until then. But depending on how long this shutdown lasts, you can certainly expect things to get a lot worse.

13 January, 2019

SPACE CINEMAGRAPHS

http://armanddijcks.com/cinemagraphs-space/ A unique collection of cinemagraphs created from high resolution raw images captured by astronauts from the International Space Station.

12 January, 2019

Author: anonymous

I am struck again and again these days by an immensely damaging aspect of modern life: the people who write our culture – the journalists, academics, artists, entertainers, and writers – derive their apprehension of reality only from other journalists, academics, artists, entertainers, and writers. They look out at the world and what they see are the tweets, posts, essays, movies, and podcasts produced by other people who absorb the world only through tweets, posts, essays, movies, and podcasts. It’s a perfect circle, and they constantly are feeding back to one another. The problem deepens and deepens in a vicious cycle. 
Take the ubiquitous, offhanded comment that “the world is changing,” in reference to contemporary progressive social movements. Why do they think the world is changing? Because the tiny worlds of journalism and Hollywood and academia have changed, albeit in superficial ways. But the vast majority of the public not only have not changed, they are not aware that anyone believes these changes are occurring. Name a progressive social movement and it’s a near certainty that the vast majority of people have never heard of it. 
The bitter part is that the internet should give people the tools to avoid this problem, but instead is the tool that enables it. And I’m not sure the average journalist cares in the slightest. Most of the writers of, say, New York magazine seem completely indifferent to the lives of anyone but the urban, educated, culturally-savvy, and upwardly mobile. It’s a huge problem and I see no plausible future where it gets any better.

Rainbow Natural Foods is closing after 42 years in business

Rainbow Natural Foods, one of the area’s oldest organic grocery stores, is closing after 42 years.
The store is located at North Decatur Plaza, 2118 N Decatur Rd, Decatur, GA 30033.
The company confirmed the news to Decaturish on Friday morning, Jan. 11. The rumors were spreading through the community in the day before the announcement.
“We have always felt that being considered a community Institution by folks in our area is one of the highest compliments Rainbow can receive,” the company said via email. “Yes, Rainbow will be closing for business sometime February.”
An employee who answered the phone on Thursday said the owners are retiring. Tony Castaldi, 64, co-owns the business with Jim Emerson, 86. Castaldi told Decaturish that there were people interested in buying the store, but he said the interest waned when faced with the cost off bringing the building up to code.

Practically Pernicious in Every Way

The important thing to recall from the original movie is that it’s not about the kids. Young Michael and Jane Banks aren’t the problem that Mary Poppins comes to fix—they are stand-ins for a young audience experiencing a story about what it means to be a parent.
Mr. Banks is the one who needs help. He is the overly disciplined, career-focused father with no time for his children. His life is turned upside-down by this strange new nanny who, in partnership with Bert the chimneysweep, guides him to the revelation that he has his priorities wrong. Bert has a lesson for the children too—but not about issues of their own. Are they really in trouble, he asks them, or is their dad? “Who looks after your father?” Bert asks, in Dick Van Dyke’s legendarily terrible Cockney accent. “Tell me that. When something terrible ‘appens, what does ‘e do? Fends for ‘imself, ‘e does. Who does ‘e tell about it? No one! Don’t blab his troubles at ‘ome. ‘E just pushes on at his job, uncomplaining and alone and silent.”

Tim Scott: Why are Republicans accused of racism? Because we’re silent on things like this.

King’s comments are not conservative views but separate views that should be ridiculed at every turn possible. Conservative principles mean equal opportunity for all to succeed, regardless of what you look like or where you are from. It is maddening to see so many folks who believe this and have only good intentions in their hearts tarnished by these radical perspectives.
That is why silence is no longer acceptable. It is tempting to write King — or other extremists on race issues, such as black-nationalist Louis Farrakhan — as lonely voices in the wilderness, but they are far more dangerous than that. They continue to rip at the fabric of our nation, a country built on hope, strength and diversity. It is the opposite of civility and fairness and will lead only to more pain and suffering.
We have made significant progress in our nation, and while there is still work to do, we cannot let these intolerant and hateful views hold us back. This is a uniquely fractured time in our nation’s history, not our worst but far from our best, and it is only together that we will rebuild the trust we seem to have lost in each other.

11 January, 2019

Tucker Carlson has sparked the most interesting debate in conservative politics

The monologue was stunning in itself, an incredible moment in which a Fox News host stated that for generations, “Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars.” More broadly, though, Carlson’s position and the ensuing controversy reveals an ongoing and nearly unsolvable tension in conservative politics about the meaning of populism, a political ideology that Trump campaigned on but Carlson argues he may not truly understand.
Moreover, in Carlson’s words: “At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then?”
The monologue and its sweeping anti-elitism drove a wedge between conservative writers. The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher wrote of Carlson’s monologue, “A man or woman who can talk like that with conviction could become president. Voting for a conservative candidate like that would be the first affirmative vote I’ve ever cast for president.” Other conservative commentators scoffed. Ben Shapiro wrote in National Review that Carlson’s monologue sounded far more like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren than, say, Ronald Reagan.

06 January, 2019

As shutdown drags on, Trump officials make new demands, seek novel ways to cope with its impacts

The Department of Housing and Urban Development sent letters to 1,500 landlords Friday as part of a last-minute effort to prevent the eviction of thousands of tenants. A lot of those tenants live in units covered by a HUD program that many agency officials didn’t realize had expired on Jan. 1 and that they are now unable to renew.
The letters instruct the landlords to use their reserve accounts so that no one is evicted, HUD spokesman Jereon Brown said. He said the budget and contract staff are “scouring for money” to figure out how to fund the contracts on an interim basis.

05 January, 2019

10 Facts You May Not Know About Columbia Heights

The park has been busy since it was just a hill. A member of the Union Army who camped on the hill during the Civil War described it as “the most delightful locality in the city of Washington.” In 1911, Mary Henderson, who owned a mansion on the hill, petitioned Congress to site the Lincoln Memorial there. She lost that bid but succeeded in getting the area designated as a park. Her vision required the displacement of a number of African Americans in the neighborhood; their homes were razed. Italian landscape architect Ferruccio Vitale and his firm were commissioned to design the park, which features the longest cascading fountain in North America.

During the Civil Rights Movement, the park was often a site of activism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often visited it when he came to D.C. The year after his death, Angela Davis called for the park to be renamed Malcolm X Park as a symbol of Black pride. Adam Clayton Powell, a Congressman from New York, introduced legislation to officially change the name, but it never passed, and the debate continues to this day.

Churchill’s Adversaries Weren’t His Enemies

I didn’t intend to write on Andrew Roberts’s biography of Winston Churchill, because so many smart people have written on it so well. Also, I don’t belong to the Churchill cult. He was a great man, arguably the greatest of the 20th century, and right on the central question of his age, the meaning of Hitler. He had both political and literary genius, the first Western political figure of whom that could be said since Lincoln. He was brave and he was a visionary; he understood and wrote about the implications of splitting the atom long before it was split. He was also a person of titanic self-regard driven by a sense of destiny that occasionally verged on the half-mad. He made blunders for which others suffered and forgave himself too quickly and too much. And he was bloody-minded. “I love this war,” he confided to a friend at the height of World War I, when he was first lord of the admiralty. “I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I can’t help it—I enjoy every second of it.”
He did. War was opportunity. He didn’t think the lights were going out all over Europe, he thought the lights were about to shine brightly on his name.

01 January, 2019

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored

New Horizons is the first NASA mission designed specifically to explore the outer solar system — a region that Stern calls “a scientific wonderland.” Out in the Kuiper belt, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as strong as it is on Earth and temperatures hover near absolute zero, the primitive building blocks of planets have persisted unchanged for 4.6 billion years.
“This is history-making, what we’re doing, in more ways than one,” Stern said. Every image sent back from New Horizons is the most distant photograph ever taken. Each maneuver is further than anything NASA has done before.
Ultima Thule is also among the most primitive objects ever explored. Unlike planets, which are transformed by geologic forces in their interiors, and asteroids, which are heated by the sun, Ultima Thule is thought to have existed in a “deep freeze" since it first formed.
“It is probably the best time capsule we’ve ever had for understanding the birth of our solar system and the planets in it,” Stern said.

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