"If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."
~ Jewish Proverb
Image of the day (Tyson Ferreira):
BODY
~ Lessons From Southwood -- "Let me share with Testosterone the Southwood workout and its cousin, the Big Five: Five by Five. Yes, I've written about the Southwood program before, but it's worth repeating."
~ How to Gain Weight without Gaining Fat -- "You want to gain weight, but you want this weight to be muscle and not fat. How do you do that?"
~ Healthy Secrets Hiding In Your Spice Rack -- "This time of year, there's nothing like the smell of warm cinnamon or fresh gingerbread baking in the oven. Did you know that many of the spices you use to make holiday treats can help keep you healthy all year long? Here's a list of natural ingredients you may want to include in your diet long after the holidays are over. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, Barbara Schultz decided to make some changes in her life, and she started in the kitchen."
~ How the Mediterranean diet could help you live longer -- "More evidence of the benefits of a Mediterranean-style diet has emerged in a study involving almost 400,000 patients. The research suggested that eating lots of fresh fish, fruit, vegetables and whole grains extends life expectancy."
~ See Chad Train -- "We all know what kind of training Chad puts his clients through, but what about Chad himself? Amazingly, his own training is mixture of Crossfit and H.I.T. Kidding! You'll be glad to hear that he practices what he preaches."
~ An In-depth Look At Bob Greene's 'Best Life' Diet -- "The Best Life diet has been growing and is now one of the most asked-about diet programs on the market (thanks in part to Oprah). Learn how this diet has unlocked the door to weight loss and healthy living."
~ Monthly Fasting May Tune the Ticker -- "Mormons have less heart disease than other Americans. Is fasting the secret?"
~ Presents that pack a healthy punch -- "Gear and gadgets for the fitness fans on your list."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ The God Effect -- "Some anthropologists argue that the idea of God first arose in larger societies, for the purpose of curbing selfishness and promoting cooperation. Outside a tightly knit group, the reasoning goes, nobody can keep an eye on everyone’s behavior, so these cultures invented a supernatural agent who could. But does thinking of an omniscient God actually promote altruism?"
~ None of the Above -- "What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race." Malcolm Gladwell opines.
~ Find Your Compelling Reason To Achieve A Successful Transformation -- "To make a successful body transformation, you must first and most importantly have a desire to change. Here are some of my reasons, examples of change, and comments from others that are good and bad!"
~ Well: A Gift That Gives Right Back? The Giving Itself -- "The ritual of showing how much we care also makes us feel good."
~ Is There A Developmental Component To The Risk For Depression? -- Psychiatrists remain divided as to how to define and classify the mood and anxiety disorders, the most common mental disorders. Committees across the globe are currently pondering how best to carve nature at its anxious joints for the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), the "gold standard" reference book for psychiatrists."
~ Distinct Brain Regions Activated With Belief, Disbelief And Uncertainty -- "The capacity of the human mind to believe or disbelieve a statement is a powerful force for controlling both behavior and emotion, but the basis of these states in the brain is not yet understood. A new study found that belief, disbelief and uncertainty activate distinct regions of the brain, with belief/disbelief affecting areas associated with the pleasantness/unpleasantness of tastes and odors."
~ The 10 Immutable Laws of Personal Branding -- "Personal branding is essential if you want to succeed in life. Why? Because you need to win people’s attention to succeed and personal branding is the way to get it."
~ How to Have Less Awkward Conversations: Assuming Rapport -- "Assuming rapport. This is definitely one of the best social skill tips I have ever learned about. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten a bit about it lately. Maybe you have too. Or missed it altogether. So I thought I’d bring it up again."
~ Why Change Fails -- "Having the desire to change your life and lifestyle, and actually making those changes, are eminently possible. You have it within yourself to accomplish your goals and aspirations."
~ The Power of Faith -- "At a time in the history of the world when a great many--perhaps most--educated people trust that they have overcome their religious impulses, that they have dispelled the mythical darkness of religious belief with the stark bright light of scientific truth, an innovative study of those impulses arrives from the field of genetic and behavioral research to offer a stunning revelation--methods of scientific discovery confirm that faith in a Supreme Being is an essential aspect of human nature, as fundamental to our emotional and psychological well-being as eating, sleeping, and breathing are to our physical health."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Pick of the bunch -- "History, politics, music, business, biography, memoir, letters and fiction. There is something for everyone in this round-up of the year's best books." From The Economist.
~ Critical Condition -- "Book reviewing faces its own "silent spring," Gail Pool warns in her new book, flashing a distress signal over the endemic rot and habitat destruction laying waste to the field of letters, and doing her darnedest to make people care. Good luck with that. Of all the nightmares on Elm Street haunting America's sleep, the bleak state of book reviewing would rank rather low on the worry meter, somewhere between the decline of the sitcom and the disappearance of the pay phone." James Wolcott reviews Pool's Faint Praise.
~ Losing the War of Ideas? -- "Wars of ideas are fought over contending versions of reality concerning ultimate things—the meaning of life—for which people are willing to die. Terrorists demonstrate this daily, as do our own troops. Terrorism is not politics by other means, or a “cry for help” that social workers can address. It is the outcome—a perverted one—of a search for meaning. Terrorism is first and foremost a spiritual disorder. That is the origin of its strength and also of the magnitude of destruction that it causes."
~ Here's an improvement on democracy -- "Our priorities in the West are wrong. Secularism is what we should be spreading across the globe." Good luck with that.
~ Teaching Rembrandt: Why introduce children to masterpieces? -- " The artist in question is Rembrandt, and the work is his 1658 Self-Portrait. Ms. Meringolo concludes that this field trip to New York's Frick Collection to show her students a masterpiece has paid off. Her students do not think of Rembrandt as some art legend but as a man who bounced back to meet life's challenges. He is more resilient—and real—than they would have guessed."
~ A New American Holy War -- "So it has come to this: the 2008 Republican Iowa caucuses have descended into a kind of holy war. The clash centers on issues that are, in Saint Augustine's phrase, ever ancient, ever new: the nature of God, the disposition of power and the sanctity of conscience. The skirmish pits Huckabee against Romney in a story of hardball politics and high-minded history, of shadowy slurs and noble principles."
~ Religion and the "Culture War," So Called -- "For a crucial skirmish of this supposed war is over which side will succeed in portraying itself as the victim of the other. In actual warfare this tactic is often used to enlist the sympathies and aid of a disinterested world, but in this ersatz war both sides seem to agree that there can be no disinterested public, only potential recruits."
~ Winners of the 2007 Utne Independent Press Awards -- "The process of picking the 2007 Utne Independent Press Award winners was technologically advanced and methodologically incontrovertible."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Ominous Arctic melt worries experts (AP) -- "An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years."
~ World's Protected Areas Threatened By Climate Change, New Study Shows -- "Climate change will affect national parks, forest reserves and other protected areas around the world, in some cases altering conditions so severely that the resulting environments will be virtually new to the planet, according to a study presented at the UN climate change talks in Bali, Indonesia."
~ Wind Turbines Produce 'Green' Energy -- and Airflow Mysteries -- "Using smoke, laser light, model airplane propellers and a campus wind tunnel, a team led by Johns Hopkins University researchers is trying to solve the airflow mysteries that surround wind turbines, an increasingly popular source of "green" energy. The National Science Foundation recently awarded the team a three-year, $321,000 grant to support the project."
~ Rising CO2 signals wetter storms for Northern Hemisphere -- "While two new studies by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences predict wetter storms for the Arctic and for the Northern Hemisphere because of global warming, whether or not this means more net precipitation depends on the latitude."
~ From Farm to Fast Food: The Need for a Backstory -- "If you're reading this blog, you're probably aware of the need to think about where your food comes from. You may consume food that's exclusively or primarily organic; you may even stick to the 100-mile diet, whose adherents consume only food produced within a 100-mile radius of where they live. But you may not have considered, at least not recently, the manner in which your food was produced--that is, who harvested it, under what conditions they did so, and what sort of pay they received for their labor."
~ New Tibetan Ice Cores Missing A-Bomb Blast Markers; Suggest Himalayan Ice Fields Haven't Grown In Last 50 Years -- "Ice cores drilled last year from the summit of a Himalayan ice field lack the distinctive radioactive signals that mark virtually every other ice core retrieved worldwide."
~ Light Up Your Holiday, Not Your Electrical Bill -- "LED tree lights put the green in Christmas."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Spiritual Kitsch, Paranoid Process and Relativist Nihilism -- "This is about our spiritual predicament. I have set out in this series to make Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics accessible by stripping away some of the jargon and color-coding and trying to get into some of the juicier issues in plain language." Good stuff!
~ Integral Warriors: One Group Ending (?), Another Starting -- "The first Integral Warriors Mens Group officially comes to an end next week with the eighth and final scheduled meeting. I didn't even know there would be a group until they all showed up on the first night and committed to the series."
~ The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 21: The Sweet Perfume of Decaying Flesh -- "This collage of birth and death, growth and rot is a reminder of my own fragile, temporal existence in this flesh. Here is a story about that collage, a story about a young girl growing up; it is my story."
~ Join the 5th Annual World Spirituality Day Celebration December 31, 2007 -- "Each year on December 31st the World Spirituality Day celebration grows. It is now a global celebration of the very delight and essence of personal, integrative and integral spirituality."
~ Book Review - Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness -- New Book by B. Alan Wallace -- "Hidden Dimensions is well researched and exceptionally well referenced, and considering the degree of difficulty in understanding certain aspects of quantum physics and esoteric Buddhism, it is highly readable. A familiarity with basic Buddhist philosophy will be a considerable help in understanding Wallace’s rather revolutionary, though not unique thesis towards the unification of physics and consciousness."
~ Death Process in Buddhism -- "Death is a progressive process of the dissolution of body and mind that can be divided into eight main stages. As the body deteriorates, the energy required to sustain sense consciousness such as our eye awareness, then coarse conceptual consciousness - thoughts and emotions - and finally subtle consciousness is lost. At the same time there are specific signs or appearances to mind that mark these eight stages."
~ Between Tradition and Relevance -- "Okay, so if you're at all familiar with me, you know that I am a Buddhist (the word "Zen" in Zen Punk Diary should have been a clue). But like a lot of Buddhists here in America, I wasn't raised Buddhist. I was raised Christian."
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