"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."
~ David Brin
Image of the day (Mick Walters):
BODY
~ Supplementation for Newbies -- "The final segment of Christian Thibaudeau's epic instructional manual for newbies. Oh what we'd have done to have this info when we were just starting out! Of course there's a lot of stuff in here that even seasoned veterans don't know..."
~ The 5 Most Critical Weight Training Exercises And How To Do Them -- "I'm about to reveal to you the 5 most critical weight training exercises and how to do them right here! Included: two short-and-sweet 15-minute workouts for a better body!"
~ What Is The Best Full-Body Workout For Muscle Gain? -- "What is the best full-body workout for muscle gain? Kick your mass into gear with these routines from our forum members. Included are benefits, sample workouts using HST & Rippetoe methods, results, and more."
~ StrongLifts Dumbbell 5×5: Strength Training Using Dumbbells -- "You want to build muscle & lose fat? Get on StrongLifts 5×5. But what if you don’t have access to barbells or you haven’t finished building your home gym yet? Here’s StrongLifts Dumbbell 5×5: same approach but using dumbbells."
~ Research Says Diabetics Most At Risk From Neglected Post Meal Sugar Peak -- "Christmas time is full of food when most of us simply have to worry about our expanding waist lines but new research led by the University of Warwick's Medical School says that people with diabetes need to pay attention to the dangers of a neglected post meal peak in blood glucose. Indeed the research shows that this post meal peak can do even more damage than a more sustained rise in blood sugar."
~ Lunging Your Way To A Better Butt -- "Lunges are a great way to shape up those legs and really shape up that butt. They’re also a great way to boost your metabolism and increase your strength."
~ Sleep Deprivation Can be Deadly -- "Study shows too much, too little sleep can be risky."
~ Enough with the food guilt -- "Berating yourself for slipping on your diet could trigger emotional overeating. To ease your mind, here are four diet flubs you can stop stressing about."
~ 14 Stress-Free Ways to Kick Weight Loss in the Butt -- "Let’s be honest: Losing weight isn’t the easiest thing in the world. All our best intentions end up doing nothing."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ How to Make a New Year’s Resolution That You’ll Actually Follow Through With -- "So it’s New Year’s Eve. The fireworks have rained and exploded across the sky, the dessert is all eaten and the champagne bottles are empty. You sit around talking and New Years resolutions come up. “Yeah, this year is gonna be different!”. You feel enthusiastic."
~ Should You Write a Personal Mission Statement? -- "Should individuals have mission statements? Absolutely! You should develop a personal mission statement for the very same reasons a business makes use of one. Your personal mission statement should describe your goals, your priorities, and your values."
~ Behavioral Therapy Most Effective for Social Phobia -- "Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) or Social Phobia, an irrational and disabling fear of interaction with unfamiliar people, public embarrassment and judgement in the eyes of others is the most common and most commonly perplexing anxiety disorder, affecting approximately 1 in 8 people."
~ The Absolutely Best Way of Giving to Others -- "This is so simple. Simple to tell, I mean...not so simple to put into practice. The absolutely best way of giving to others, is by feeling good, by being happy...or at least by being in a state of general contentment. By being consciously happy."
~ The Perfect Counsellor? -- "Finding, cultivating, even celebrating an ability to accept ourselves in all our messy imperfection is a major element of counselling. The idea of the perfect counsellor is one which we need to dispel, rather than apologising for not living up to it."
~ Keeping Your Brain Young -- "I don’t know about any magic pill, but there is research that shows there are things we can do to help ward off the effects of Alzheimer’s and Dementia. But, before I divulge the secret-sauce of mind disease prevention, I need to explain a property of the brain that may be contrary to what you already know."
~ Seasonal Affective Disorder - Symptoms and Treatments -- "Do the shorter, darker days of winter leave you feeling tired, listless, or downright depressed? While everyone might feel a touch of the winter blues now and then, others..."
~ Scientific American Magazine: Cooking Up Bigger Brains -- "Cooking could have made the fibrous fruits, along with the tubers and tough, raw meat that chimps also eat, much more easily digestible, he thought—they could be consumed quickly and digested with less energy. This innovation could have enabled our chimplike ancestors’ gut size to shrink over evolutionary time; the energy that would have gone to support a larger gut might have instead sparked the evolution of our bigger-brained, larger-bodied, humanlike forebears."
~ What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith -- "A popular purveyer of atheism ventures into brain science, with a study that he contends is the first to show how the brain processes belief." Sam Harris as neuroscientist.
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Godless Delusion -- "Some postmodernists speak of the “end of philosophy,” since it supposedly can no longer tell us anything about the world independent of its relation to us — about that which exists “out there” and derives, as [Charles] Taylor puts it, “from a power which is beyond me.” At present, he writes, “we live in a condition” in which we suspect our own beliefs as having been influenced by sources other than the self and its reasons, with the human subject the mere effect of forces alien to our being."
~ Twilight of the Books -- "The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, 'Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.'"
~ Class and the classroom -- "Vast new fortunes and rising inequality and tuition fees have put elite American colleges at risk of turning back into the class-based institutions they were 100 years ago."
~ Deepak Chopra: How Your Story Changes the World -- "Every life is part of society, and therefore every personal story is part of society's story. When you use the word "America," an unfolding story is implied. America stands for a history that has its own values, prejudices, crises, hopes, and fears. The same is true when you talk or just think, about topics like religion, immigration, terrorism, or the economy. All these topics are actually unfolding processes, and with each one comes a story."
~ Dan Brown: The Electoral College and Making Presidential Elections Less Ridiculous -- "In New York, I know that whether I go to the polls or not, the Democrat presidential candidate is going to carry all of the electoral votes from my state. Both parties acknowledge that New York is a perennial blue state, and thus neither candidate (even if they are Giuliani and Clinton -- two New Yorkers) will spend much time campaigning in my state. I still vote because it feels like the right thing to do, but I know that my New York vote just doesn't count for much."
~ Election 2008: Hillary Clinton's Militarism Exposed -- "Clinton's foreign policy is the definition of 'Bush lite.'"
~ Still Hope for Fred Thompson? -- "Amid Romney's hopes and Huckabee's surge, he's the forgotten conservative in Iowa's race. But a 15-day campaign blitz is keeping the former Tennessee senator optimistic." Although I disagree with Thompson on many things, my sense is that he is too smart to get elected. And that's a shame.
~ Putting the Humanity in Philanthropy -- "What's the best way to decide how -- and how much -- to give to charity?"
~ State of Emergency -- "With journalism on its deathbed and desperately clinging for life, it needs to atone for its sins if has any chance for survival."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Cultural Selection -- "Now we're in the midst of the next mutation in evolutionary theory: Human evolution didn't slow as we advanced from nature to culture. It accelerated and changed. Culture, born of natural selection, became natural selection's driving force."
~ Environment: Bali: World Suckered by the U.S. Once Again -- "America will keep on wrecking climate talks as long as those with vested interests in oil and gas fund its political system."
~ Is the End of the Digital Age Already at Hand? -- "A half century after transistors were first integrated onto silicon chips, the technology for shrinking them appears to be reaching its limit. Without the regular, dramatic performance improvements we've come to expect, the computer industry may hit a wall."
~ New property found in ancient mineral lodestone -- "Using the latest methods for nanofabrication, a team led by Rice University physicists has discovered a surprising new electronic property in one of the earliest-known and most-studied magnetic minerals on Earth -- lodestone, also known as magnetite."
~ Study shows urban sprawl continues to gobble up land -- "Despite reports to the contrary, urban sprawl has continued to grow significantly for the past several decades, new research suggests."
~ Financing green building and retrofits -- "Steve Heckeroth's piece "Solar is the solution" has been recommended all over the green blogosphere, first by Robert Rapier, I think. It's great reading, but I wanted to hone in on one thing he mentions -- a piece of public policy that has been woefully under-hyped."
~ Light speed communications for supercomputers -- "The performance of tomorrow`s supercomputers will be dictated by their ability to exchange large volumes of data instantly between the hundreds of thousands of processors of which they are built."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Are Science & Spirituality Two Mutually Exclusive Pursuits? Part 3 Faith, Belief, and Rituals versus Enlightenment -- "What is the difference between faith and belief? Are rituals and the so-called paths to enlightenments necessary? Are they effective? Consciousness-integrated science provides some answers."
~ AQAL, THE NEXT GENERATION? -- "Is AQAL the best foundation for an Integral program of personal growth? This article proposes an alternative model called ADAP2T (All Dimensions, All Processes, All Participants, Together) that is more clear, more balanced, more differentiated, and more complete."
~ The Four Riders -- "While I have enjoyed watching Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris give their respective views on several important topics, I'm also quite dissapointed (once again) with what they finally had to say in this "first-of-its-kind". Nothing new was expected, I know, but once you see them four together, the limitations of the so-called "new atheist" agenda become somewhat painful to watch."
~ Food and supplies for the Dallmans — lookin’ local -- "Coupla things D5 does that I just wanted to note for the record."
~ Unleashing Creativity -- "In an insightful keynote address at a Smithsonian event Paul MacCready, a pioneering inventor of the first practical flying machine powered by a human being, talks about “inventive creativity” and the importance of socially responsible entrepreneurship for our collective future."
~ Practice makes perfect except when it does not -- "Is it fair to say that in Buddhism, practice doesn't make perfect, it reveals it? In a vein of writing that relates back to my recent posts on seated meditation as surrender, this one in particular, I am giving an update on the state of my own Buddhist practice." My soccer coach said that practice makes permanent -- so you need practice with precision. Good advice.
~ The New Atheists are People Too -- "So I just finished watching the two-hour video of The Four Horsemen (aka The New Atheists). This video is like a status report from the battefield of religion vs. science. It's the first time I've seen the four--Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens--in the same discussion. I enjoyed watching it because of the intellectual breadth of the discussion, and because it also confirmed what I've been ranting all along: they are as diverse as the religion they criticize; they have different motivations and approaches to religion; there is a spectrum of the New Atheists."
~ The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 22: Adventures of a New Age Traveler -- "There were no welcome banners at the entrance to California as I had imagined from the way Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Kate Wolf sing of it. The Rainbow Family didn’t throw a welcome party just because I had arrived. Instead, I spent my first weeks in Oakland, looking out between the steel bars of a dusty attic-bedroom window, wondering what the hell to do with my life."
~ Indigo Evolution? -- "I recently saw the film "Indigo Evolution," and I must say I felt very compelled to express my reflections on this. The film set me off, and not in an positively inspired way. If indigos are meant to be "system busters," then I'm going to have to bust this one. Please bear with me. I do not mean to be attacking anybody or their beliefs, nor do I mean to sound arrogant and pompous, but at the same time I can't remain silent on this."
Filed in: indigo children new age traveler new atheists practice Buddhism creativity locavore Dawkins Dennett Harris Hitchens AQAL ADAP2Tscience spirituality light speed communications green building urban sprawl lodestone digital age climate talks evolution journalism philanthropy Fred Thompson Hillary Clinton electoral college Deepak Chopra universities books Charles Taylor faith bigger brains cooking SAD therapy giving social phobia misson statement new year's resolution weight loss food guilt sleep lunges diabetes dumbbells weight training exercises supplements speedlinking
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