Honestylog.com

What I See

Recently, I began receiving this Financial Times newsletter in my email box. I was awestruck by the image, and I still am every time I see it.

The sorts of people I hate & loathe would look at that as a scar on the planet. Those whom I consider stuck in dead-end, primitive superstition and fairy tales downplay such potential as "merely" the work of man. For me, it represents the path to the very highest ideals achievable by man through molding and leveraging physical reality, capital, values, and relationships in the pursuit of his highest moral purpose: the advancement of his life, ultimately reflected back in happiness and genuine, long-term well being.

You want to go to heaven? Look right up there. It's actually achievable; not through repentance to and redemption from either mother nature or imagined gods, but rather through reason, capitalism, individualism, and the exchange of values to mutual benefit.

How Do You Do It?

I caught like five minutes of Terry McAuliffe on Tim Russert yesterday as I was packing up in San Fran.

It's all just automatic lying, all the time, and everyone is perfectly happy to play along. Disgusting. I don't know what I'd do if I thought that ultimately, what I make of my life somehow necessitates a daily dose of the bullshit they're peddling.

I don't think the nightmarish disaster that is national politics will in any way be solved until people lose interest in the spectacle, beyond derisive ridicule and moral condemnation for the whole lot of it, without distinction or equivocation.

San Francisco

Bea & I are up for the weekend, along with my mom & dad. We have a membership with Worldmark, which we have never regretted buying for a minute. In fact, we've gone back two more times to buy extra credits. Highly recommended. But it spoils you. It's very difficult to stay in a standard hotel room, any more.

That was taken from across the street, just outside of the Tunnel Top bar (Stockton Tunnel, just off Union Square). It's a fun bar, and, they stock McCallen.

We'll head over in a bit for breakfast atop the Hyatt, then maybe head down to the Apple store, shop generally, maybe a movie over at the Bloomingdale's Mall (or whatever it's officially called), and dinner tonight is at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. That'll require a cab ride (once my car gets parked, it stays parked until I leave).

Oversight

I think I was remiss in not highlighting this wonderfully descriptive image in this post, specifically the link to Mark Sisson.

It concerns doing lots of cardio, which makes you hungry, especially for carbs, which spikes insulin, driving the carbs to fat and making you even more hungry, so you do even more cardio.

It’s like digging a hole to put the ladder in to wash the basement windows.

That could apply to a whole lot of quotidian clusterfuckery I observe.

God Bless the Intertubes

Delicious.

(Beck snagged that from Soja)

Organic Enterprise Sales Team

Steve Jobs doesn't need a sales force because he already has one: employees like the ones in my company.

So, you tell me: is Steve Jobs ever going to screw up?

Another Smackdown: Derbyshire Puts Ben Stein in Short Pants

Greg Swann quoted the best part. I'll take on the second best.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood libel against Western civilization itself. What next, Ben? Johann Sebastian Bach ran a slave-trading enterprise on the side? Kepler started the Thirty Years War? Tolstoy instigated the Kishinev Pogrom? Dante was a bag-man for the Golden Horde? Why not go smash a few windows in Chartres Cathedral, Ben? Break wind in a chamber-music concert? Splash some red paint around in the Uffizi? Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.

The whole thing: A Blood Libel on Our Civilization.

Smackdown

This is just too good to quote any of it. You'll just have to go read the whole thing, as Peter -- the very smart UK veterinarian -- ridicules the "calories in / calories out" oversimplification.

Stephan has commentary, and Mark, looking great at 54, has prescient insights into exactly what Peter is talking about.

Read it all. Then, consider being of some help to your family and friends who've suffered too long under the Diet Delusion. You very well might save their life.

Repent, Sinners; The End of the World Draws Nigh

My bother emails some funny religious predictions for the end of the world as we know it, circa 1970.

AI

Well, David Cook made it through, which is good, because I think he's got the most edge and talent. I could definitely get along with he and Syesha in the final, but it'll probably be Archuleta and one of the other two. David A. has a great voice and all, but he seems to have only one game, and I really dislike the phony coy humility. I'm much more a solemn nod kinda guy, like Cook gives off.

My main reason for blogging this, however, was that one of my two favorites across all the series is Bo Bice, and he turned in a pretty good guest performance last night. Played electric guitar, too. My other favorite was Daughtry.

Here's an example of why I dig Bice, from very early on in season 4, Whipping Post:

Neglect

I've been neglecting email. For two, I've got Adam, my cousin, and Ronny over in Japan (Ronny: I lived in Hayma in Honshu for five years; '84-'89). They both want to know about the working-out aspect of EvFit.

The truth is, I'm not the person to ask. This is the one aspect of the thing I've surrendered. By happenstance, I've got a trainer who knew short, intermittent, variable, and intense. I see him twice a week, and seriously: I'm 'yessir' all the way; literally, to the point I enjoy saying "yes sir" (I've had it said enough to me: my turn). He barks orders; I submit and obey. I wouldn't have it any other way, in spite of the reality that it's normally me in command of all that's around me. I read the stuff about various exercises, and I'm immediately at a loss because I don't even know the names or descriptions of the stuff I do, which is various and at different times and different days, random. It's my trainer's job; you get it?

Here's what I'll advise, because I'm certainly not qualified to advise on weight training regimes: follow Chris' blog, Conditioning Research. He is very good at tracking just about every relevant thing out there, he seems to know a lot about training, and maybe he'd even be kind enough to do a beginner's workup, if he can't point you to something already done. Chris: the trouble I find with a lot of stuff is that beginners don't know the names/descriptions of exercises (me included). To them, it's like saying, "Do 3x10 of aklkjdlka alknlllasdd's." In terms of finding exercise diagrams on the Internet, I find it hit & miss. YouTubes are probably the solution, and better anyway.

Finally: think. Think evolutionary and functional. If I had no specific knowledge and lived out where I didn't have access to facilities like a gym, I'd do stuff like climb trees and rocks, hike hills with weight strapped on, do a lot of jumping -- with and without weight -- and a lot of short burst sprints of random duration. In essence, think about the functions you might have to perform if you were living by your own means in total, and try to duplicate those functions with the intensity that your life depended on it. Can you imagine trying to catch a rabbit when you haven't eaten in three or four days? Solving that problem has 2 million years of cellular evolution behind it, and to the extent you can simulate and duplicate it is the extent to which you express your genes, which of course want you to be lean and mean.

The Vote is In

And apparently, nobody is buying shares in the Republican Party.

And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.

On a plain practical level, I can't understand why a person in the world would give a hoot about the Republicans, when they can simply get The Real Thing™ from the Democrats.

It's far and long from the time and place where there was any difference between Coke & Pepsi worth caring about, if there ever really was.

(Via a link from Billy)

"a conviction and killing machine"

That's exactly what it was.

And the people loved it; and cheered.

Backpeddle

Wanna know how stupid they think you are?

"Global warming may 'stop', scientists predict"

Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said.

Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a "lull" for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Yeah, uh-huh. Until 2015. Right. Got it.

This is how it begins, folks. They're never going to just come out and admit to being the self-serving-at-your-expense con men they all are, with the thief and liar Al Gore at their helm. Instead, they're going to bank on how dreadfully illiterate and stupid most of the world's population is.

Setting the ethics of it aside, it's a damn good bet. Even when temperatures begin to decline, who do you think will be taking credit, and how many will extend it?

(link: McPhillips, who also links to a interview of Roy Spencer, author of Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor. That interview ("H3: Obama's Judgment") begins about 10 minutes in and you can just advance the slider bar to get there.)

Voluntary Transparency

My company, Provanta, begins releasing it's weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly results for its clients.

Not often mentioned, but a hearty round of applause for the major credit card banks who recognized financial hardship, and voluntarily agreed to these settlement agreements in lieu of more forceful options at their disposal.

Later: Monthly results for April are now posted.