| You Communicate Like a Woman |
 You empathize, talk things out, and express your emotions freely. You're a good listener, and you're non-judgmental with your advice. Communication is how you connect with people. You're always up for a long talk, no matter how difficult the subject matter is. |
Find Enjoyment In Transience
We make every effort to keep things as they are, because human beings, alone, lament transience. Yet no matter how we grieve or protest, there is no way to impede the flow of anything. If we but see things as they are and flow with them, we may find enjoyment in transience. Because human life is transient, all manner of figures are woven into its fabric.
~ Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book.
You know them from the dentist's office, high school dances, and possibly even the shower stall, but do you know who actually sings these heart-wrenching numbers? Match the saccharine sweet love song to the stars willing to put their hearts on the line. Oh, and if the quiz comes across a little easy, that's intentional. Love hurts, but that doesn't mean quizzes on love songs have to.
Read the whole interview.
It’s everybody’s favorite topic: Drugs, sex and chicks. As promised a few weeks ago, we now present part two of our interview with “sexpert” Susie Bright.
Read Part 1
To listen the full interview in MP3, click here.
RU SIRIUS: Tell us a bit about your psychedelic sex workshop.
SUSIE BRIGHT: OK. About a year ago. I got invited to this conference in San Jose called “Sacred Elixirs.”
I wouldn’t have paid any attention to that name because I’m an atheist. When people say sacred, I’m always snoozing… I don’t pay attention. But then, I found out that it was a reunion of the heaviest, coolest, smartest people in psychedelics. Oh! That sacred? I’m there! Oh my god, it was so fabulous. There were so many fantastic people there. And Sasha Shulgin delivered a chemistry lesson that made me realize that if I’d had him as a science teacher, everything could have turned out differently. For him, it’s like a musician talking about music. It’s a language.
RU: Plus he speaks in this rapid high pitch. It’s like getting a download of information from some kind of alien.
SB: I just couldn’t wait to go home and write about all the things people talked about. But while I was there, some of us women noticed that virtually every presenter was a guy; all the poetry was read by fellows — it was almost quaint. We didn’t, like, have a hissy fit about it, it was just sort of dumb. There were so many interesting women there. Every woman I met there, I wanted to spend hours talking to. Everyone was so interesting and intelligent. So some of us started brainstorming about what would be fun to talk about at a woman-oriented conference. And I said, “Well, so many things… I mean: sex. And not just the erotics of sex, the pleasures of sex, but sex in terms of one’s sexual life cycle. A lot of us here have our memories of what it was like when we discovered psychedelics as young people. But then, what happens when you become a mother? What happens as you age? How does your relationship to your sexual life cycle and your drug of choice change over time? I don’t know. No one talks about this! Wouldn’t it be great if we did?”
So we got a group of women together at this crazy sort of “Peacock retreat” in Sonoma run by a woman who’s really into Egyptology. She has a lot of gorgeous peacocks wandering around, which kind of added a little atmosphere. It was so much fun. It was like fifty people. You got to know everybody on a first-name basis.
The untold story — which I didn’t get until I was there — was the generation gap. We had a lot of good talks about it. There were these young people who were in MAPS and Erowid — they’re like these new groups that are trying to decriminalize drugs and raise drug consciousness in a very contemporary fashion.
RU: They’re very organized and intelligent and digital.
SB: Yeah. They’re very geeky.
STEVE ROBLES: Drug nerds.
SB: They’re drug nerds! Thank you. They aren’t drug hippies. And they said very politely – we don’t want to just sit around listening to how great your acid trip was in 1969. And they were right. They want to hear about stuff that’s happening now, and in their future. At one point this amazing young woman who everybody seemed to revere stood up. She looked like the all-American girl. She was like Gidget on acid.
RU: I think Gidget was on acid
A Sheet of Paper
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "Inter-" with the verb "to be," we have a new verb, inter-be...
Looking even more deeply, we can see ourselves in this sheet of paper too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, it is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. We cannot point out one thing that is not here--time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book.
The article goes on from there to look at one specific example of a Hindu woman living in Europe who buys prayers in a specific temple back in India, and how those prayers get to the temple she intended. Very interesting.The Internet has become a hub of religious worship for millions of people around the world. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs and people of other faiths turn regularly to Web sites to pray, meditate and gather in "virtual" houses of worship graphically designed to look like the real thing. Some sites offer rites from baptism to confession to conversion to Judaism.
For many cyber-worshipers, online religious life conducted at home or in an Internet cafe has replaced attendance at traditional churches, temples, mosques and synagogues. Some are coming to religion for the first time, in a setting they find as comfortable as their grandparents found a church pew, while millions of people reared on churchgoing are discovering new ways to worship.
"The first wave of religion online, in the 1990s, was mainly for nerds and young people and techies," said Morten Hojsgaard, a Danish author who has written extensively about online religion. "But now it really is a mirror of society at large. This is providing a new forum for religious seekers."
Hojsgaard said the number of Web pages dealing with God, religion and churches increased from 14 million in 1999 to 200 million in 2004. Religion now nearly rivals sex as a topic on the Internet: A search for "sex" on Google returns about 408 million hits, while a search for "God" yields 396 million.
The boom in online religion comes at a time when people, especially the young, are questioning traditional institutions, Hojsgaard said. Many are interested in religion, but they want the freedom to fashion a personalized style of worship. "Old mechanisms of religious authority are changing," Hojsgaard said. "There is more emphasis on individualism. We want to decide for ourselves."
India, with more than 1.1 billion people and a passion for technology, has become a leader in the practice of religion online, through a very large number of often very small Web sites, a pattern that reflects the decentralization of much of religious life here. Hindus sitting in the United States or Europe watch streaming live video of morning prayers from temples in their home towns. Sikhs listen to podcasts of prayers from Kashmir. Muslims download schedules of prayer times and recordings of sung verses from the Koran.
Members of India's fast-growing middle class have embraced the Internet in ways that startle their parents, many of whom were raised in villages that still barely have telephone service. At many Hindu temples, a priest's typical day includes pre-dawn prayers for a sacred cow or elephant, and time set aside to read e-mails asking for blessings.
| You'll die from a Drug or Alcohol accident. | ||||
| Let's face it - when you get drunk/high you lose all control and do stupid stuff. Unfortunately in your case those propaganda anti-escapism commercials prove true. | ||||
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| 'How will you die?' at QuizGalaxy.com |
Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.
~ Tennessee Williams
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
~ Douglas Adams
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
~ Redd Foxx
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
~ Oscar Wilde
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
~ H. L. Mencken
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
~ Thomas J. Kopp
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind.
~ Mark Harrold
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confesses, and wants his fingers back
by Walid
Enjoys his time at Guantanamo BayWASHINGTON (UCS News) -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, admitted to those attacks and numerous others during a U.S. military hearing on Saturday. After his confession he requested that his interrogators return six missing fingers and remove the electrodes from is testicles.In a statement from him, read by a U.S. military representative, he said, "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z." The transcript continues with the list of operations he was responsible for, including the Richard Reid shoe bomber attempt to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, Rudolph Giuliani's second divorce, the US failure in Iraq, E.Coli poison outbreaks in Spinach and the shocking conditions found at Walter Reed army medical center.
The list of some 29 operations he was responsible for is followed by a shorter list of operations he was partially responsible for, including an assassination attempt against then-Pope John Paul II while he was visiting the Philippines.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed admitted that he timed the release of his confession to help bolster the sagging poll numbers of President George W. Bush. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also stated that he has been tortured nearly every day since he arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.
| You Are Very Skeptical |
 Your personal motto is: "Prove it." While some ideas, like life after death, may seem nice... You aren't going to believe them simply because it feels good. You let science and facts be your guide... Even if it means you don't share the beliefs of those around you. |
You may question whether the brain can really create physical reality. However, remember that dreams and schizophrenia (consider the movie A Beautiful Mind) prove the capacity of the mind to construct a spatial-temporal reality as real as the one you are experiencing now. The visions and sounds schizophrenic patients see and hear are just as real to them as this page or the chair you’re sitting on.Lanza makes a pretty good argument in what is a very interesting article, but I'm not buying it. Perhaps my little mind is too linear to believe that animal consciousness creates physical reality, or perhaps this theory is too close to solipsism (which seems to me to be highly narcissistic) for my taste.
We have all seen pictures of the primitive earth with its volcanoes overflowing with lava, or read about how the solar system itself condensed out of a giant swirling gas cloud. Science has sought to extend the physical world beyond the time of our own emergence. It has found our footsteps wandering backward until on some far shore they were transmuted into a trail of mud. The cosmologists picked up the story of the molten earth and carried its evolution backward in time to the insensate past: from minerals by degrees back through the lower forms of matter—of nuclei and quarks—and beyond them to the big bang. It seems only natural that life and the world of the inorganic must separate at some point.
We consider physics a kind of magic and do not seem at all fazed when we hear that the universe—indeed the laws of nature themselves—just appeared for no reason one day. From the dinosaurs to the big bang is an enormous distance. Perhaps we should remember the experiments of Francesco Redi, Lazzaro Spallanzani, and Louis Pasteur—basic biological experiments that put to rest the theory of spontaneous generation, the belief that life had arisen spontaneously from dead matter (as, for instance, maggots from rotting meat and mice from bundles of old clothes)—and not make the same mistake for the origin of the universe itself. We are wont to imagine time extending all the way back to the big bang, before life’s early beginning in the seas. But before matter can exist, it has to be observed by a consciousness.
Physical reality begins and ends with the animal observer. All other times and places, all other objects and events are products of the imagination, and serve only to unite knowledge into a logical whole. We are pleased with such books as Newton’s Principia, or Darwin’s Origin of Species. But they instill a complacency in the reader. Darwin spoke of the possibility that life emerged from inorganic matter in some “warm little pond.” Trying to trace life down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously from nonliving matter wants for the rigor and attention of the quantum theorist.
Not your average workout: Tire flipping, jumping, sprints with a jumpstretch band, runs with kettlebells, turkish get ups with kettlebells, medicine ball throwing, kipping pullups, bear crawls, tuck sits on gymnastics rings, barbell thrusters. Real, oldschool, brutal - full body movements.
You'll notice they aren't doing any curls or tricep extensions, no machines, no pussy bodybuilding "watch yourself in the mirror exercises" crap. It takes real world strength to flip tires and do pullups and squats and sprints. Essentially, the actors were training for performance - and the look came with it.
The average celebrity trainer would have trained the actors to look like Spartan Warriors - Mark Twight put the actors in 300 through workouts that would create the kind of strength and power they would need to be Spartan Warriors.
And here are details on the circuit they did -- the 300 reps routine:
The now legendary "300 Reps Workout", a.k.a. "Spartans, tonight we dine in hell!"
The workout was first reported as: 25 pull ups, 50 deadlifts - 50 push ups (sometimes on gymnastics rings), 50 jumps onto a 24-inch box, 50 tire drags (dragging a huge tire attached to your waist across the room and back), 50 single-arm clean-and-presses using a 36-pound kettlebell, and another 25 pull ups.
The latest version everyone is talking about: 25 pullups, 50 deadlifts with 135 pounds, 50 pushups, 50 jumps on a 24-inch box, 50 floor wipers (like a hanging leg raise on the floor), 50 single-arm clean-and-presses using a 36-pound kettlebell, and 25 more pullups.
Mark Twight probably put them through both of these versions. And several other versions. In fact, most of the workouts were probably randomzied. They very rarely, if ever, would they do the same workout twice.
The idea is to do this workout for time - and if you did go through the hell of repeating a workout, to try and beat your time from before. Like a race. Speed, power and intensity are the keys here. Ideally you'd complete the circuits in around 20 minutes.
Sounds pretty cool to me. That's my kind of workout. I have never trained for look, only for strength and power -- the look is a nice side effect. However, if you aren't at least in some kind of shape -- and if you have never done these full-body lifts -- start with 100 reps and see how that feels.
Hillary Clinton Tries To Woo Voters By Rescinding Candidacy
DES MOINES, IA—Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton officially rescinded her bid for president at an Iowa campaign appearance Saturday.Enlarge ImageClinton bids farewell to a sea of new supporters.
"Just two months ago, I promised that I'd listen to every voice through my town hall meetings, web chats, and trips to communities across the country," said Clinton, whose opponents have accused her of being out of touch with average voters. "America, you spoke clearly and with conviction—and I listened. And so I say to you today: Let the conversation end."
Polls showed that immediately following her speech, Clinton's approval numbers skyrocketed all across the South, wide swaths of the Midwest, scattered pockets of the Northeast, and in California, Alaska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Hawaii, and Ohio.
Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, described Clinton's decision as the "single most unifying move" the highly polarizing figure has made yet.
"Hillary's always had a hard time connecting to audiences, but these Joe Six-Pack Iowans absolutely lit up at her speech," Matthews said. "For the first time, she's really speaking to the whole nation."
Enlarge ImageClinton supporters and detractors applaud the move.
Along with Clinton's announcement, her campaign website posted the results of a recent telephone poll showing that an overwhelming majority of both Republican and Democrat respondents answered "Yes" to the questions "Don't you wish Sen. Clinton was not even running?" and "Wouldn't everything be better in this country if Sen. Clinton just bowed out now?"
Fox News Channel's chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, called the announcement classic Clintonian triangulation—finding an unorthodox issue that people can agree upon across socioeconomic and party lines.
"She's cold, she's calculating, she's blind with ambition, but I'll be doggoned if she doesn't have her finger on the country's pulse," Cameron said. "Hillary's not usually one for surprises, but this was a paradigm-shifting moment that's guaranteed to turn her campaign around."
Many Republican-leaning voters said that while they still didn't agree with Sen. Clinton on the issues, they were personally impressed with the boldness of her decision.
"This was an unexpected moment, and it took a lot of courage on her part," said Miami resident Brian Highland, a former supporter of Arizona Sen. John McCain. "I've been a staunch Republican all my life, but now that Hillary's dropped out of the race, she's definitely got my vote."
In the political blogosphere, some describe the move as a brilliant political stratagem in tune with the national zeitgeist, while others insist it reveals Clinton's tendency to pander to public opinion.
"I knew Hillary was willing to change her positions based on surveys and focus groups, but I'd always assumed her presidential aspiration was her most deeply held belief," blogger Joe Sudbay of AMERICAblog wrote. "If she's going to pull out of the race just to please voters, maybe she doesn't deserve to be president."
Added Sudbay: "She said she was 'in it to win it'—was that just posturing, too?"
Clinton will unroll a $15 million ad buy tomorrow covering the major primary states to publicize her withdrawal, and kick off a 19-month bus tour next week through the expected battleground states.
"I want every potential voter in America to know my position on this important issue," said Clinton, referring to her candidacy. "When people go to the polls next year to vote for 'anybody but Hillary,' I want them to think of just one candidate: me."
