An elegant study, formulated by psychologists Ellen Langer and Alia Crum at Harvard University in 2007, examined the effect of simply being told that you are doing something healthy. Eighty-four female room attendants working in various hotels were divided into two groups: one was told that cleaning hotel rooms was "good exercise" and "satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle", along with elaborate explanations of how and why; the other group did not receive this cheering information, and just carried on cleaning hotel rooms. Four weeks later, the 'informed' group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before, and showed a significant decrease in weight, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index. Amazingly, both groups were still reporting the same amount of activity.

I believe the reality is that pulling out a credit card and ordering a book or a course is easy. Actually consuming the material and doing the work is hard. When people discover there's actual work involved, they too often reach for the credit card again to move on to the next big thing.

- Bill Hibbler

*Most kinds of .45 have unexceptional muzzle energy and are big and fat, giving fairly poor performance even against light, flexible body armour. It was the standard US military pistol round for a long time and many diehards still swear by it, but people who carry guns for a living - cops, soldiers, criminals - are mostly using other calibres these days. (Some spec-ops troops still use .45, as the bullet is subsonic and thus can be effectively silenced.)

The other major nations need the USA gone in a world facing environmental and resource depletion problems. You don't need to have studied Sun Tzu to work that out. So they have, each in their own way and in a quite natural fashion, sought to undermine the USA at every opportunity. Fortunately for them the greed and stupidity of the US elite made this a lot easier than they ever could have dreamed possible.

I believe we are now in a geo-political end game for the US as a major power, the objective is no longer solely to bring down the USA, that is a fait accompli, but to do it in such a way as to prevent collateral damage and some sort of Götterdämmerung blaze of glory spasm by the US in its death throes. This is why the Chinese and Co aren't simply blowing up big chunks of Wall Street and the Fed (although they could with tap of a keyboard. SELL. EXECUTE.) and taunting the broken dazed populace of the "last superpower" live on CNN.

- S E Pearson

This is a good point at which to ask ourselves the question – “What is the scenario that would cause maximum damage to the average PM sector investor, and at the same time funnel his resources most efficiently into the pockets of Big Money?” This is an easy one to answer – it would be a gold breakout to new highs that would trigger a wave of buy stops and lead to many chart followers and a broad swath of investors piling in. Having “lobster potted” the majority Big Money could then engineer a savage reversal and plunge and you had better believe that they have got the clout to do it – this is the game they played with copper last year.

- Clive Maund

其根在腳。發於腿。主宰於腰。形於手指。
由腳而腿而腰。

- Tai Chi Classic writing: Song of 13 Postures

I'd be surprised if there had never been a thread here about how the Enterprise was clearly not on a "peaceful mission" but a neoliberal imperialist mission. If it's peaceful, why a military ship? Why under military command? Where are the diplomats? Why does Kirk despise every diplomat he has to deal with? They often come cruising in where they're not wanted like Commodore Peary in Tokyo Harbor saying "open up your markets to our trade or else!" They're like someone who goes down the street banging on strangers' doors shouting "Achtung! Open up and be friendly!" They're just interstellar housebreakers.

My favorite is how they have this "Prime Directive" which they violate in every episode, often giving some ideological explanation for why it doesn't apply in some case. For example: "this civilization is stagnant, and the Prime Directive only applies to progressive civilizations, not stagnant ones".

So if according to their ideology a place is stagnant and not progressing, then they can interfere as much as they want. Sounds familiar.
- LATOC forum

"Blessed is he who has found his work, let him ask no other blessing."

- Thomas Carlyle

My personal "Basic Integrated Curriculum" is

Wrestling:
Sprawl
Clinch
Bodylock takedown

Striking:
Jab
Cross
Hook
Crazy Monkey guard
Low Thai kick

Grappling:
Basic Positions
Mount Escapes
Side Control Escapes
Scissor Sweep
Situp Sweep
Back Control
RNC
Arm Triangle

That's for "Self Defense". If some regular dude studies that list for a year they will be well equipped to handle 99.99999% of all unarmed encounters they will ever have. They don't have to make any decisions about breaking peoples arms. They know how to escape from bad positions and they know how to subdue someone on the ground.

- kintanon

"Maybe someday in the distant future some idylic, in touch with nature, hunter gatherer society will emerge from the ashes, but by then I'll be long dead and won't give a shit. "

-bdrube

And all Stilt-Man wanted to do was go to the movies and watch Halloween II with his date. (He heard that during horror movies, sometimes girls will get scared and turn to their dates for "protection" and that can lead to a goodnight kiss!

- Bullshido poster

bardo

"You make your own reality" and Monroe proved it while discovering reality is a hologram type of illusion one hundred percent mentally created and imagined.

- El Principe (amazon reviewer)

"The elites are all going to run in there and hide during 2012, and then after we're all dead, they'll emerge to restart another human farm."

- somebody's internet comment about abrupt cancellation of Yucca Mountain nuke waste storage project

"As of the moment of writing, the out-of-pocket cost of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is $900,000,000,000. When you add in the already incurred future costs of veterans benefits, interest on the debt, the forgone use of the resources for productive purposes, and such other costs as computed by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expertLinda Bilmes, "our" government has wasted $3,000,000,000,000--three thousand billion dollars--on two wars that have no benefit whatsoever for any American whose income does not derive from the military/security complex, about which five-star general President Eisenhower warned us."

-Paul Craig Roberts

In the dissolution of the witness, there was literally no more experience of a "me" at all. The experience of personal identity switched off and was never to appear again.

- Suzanne Segal

"As a man in a dream who fails to lay hands upon another whom he is pursuing- the one cannot escape nor the other overtake."

(Homer's Iliad, XX11.)

Bullshido misc., typical:

In spite of all odds and proof to the contrary, you should continue on your course to discover the one tiny detail that everyone has missed that will make your art the deadly art you want it to be. It could be shoe type, sock color, vitamin brand, it's there, just keep searching. Try combinations of magic potions, guess work, and anything that doesn't include training. (because that has proven to be a dead end)

Tom C.

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Just through talking to people, most people I know have established a theory that I also subscribe to:

"All russians crazy, you want neurotic girlfriend or homicidal best friend, Get a russian"

I'm sure there are many normal ones, but every single one I've met has been balls to the wall crazy, and generally deadly (nice though). So it seems strange to me that Systema doesn't work.

Ladies be pretty though.

"When people are earning a new physical skill they often apply way too much muscular tension, which will naturally reduce as they become more proficient. Let's take a left jab as an example; a raw beginner may tense their bicep at the beginning on the punch and keep it tense all the way through, which is actually counter-productive because it means the tricep has to work harder than it needs to in order to extend the punch. Same applies to other muscle groups. With more training, the boxer learns to relax certain groups and their punch speeds up and becomes more efficient.

However, the mechanics of a jab or cross are distinct from those of the so-called "ballistic strike", which is also referred to as a wave strike, a whip strike, etc. Linear punches work by aligning the skeleton behind the strike, which allows an efficient transfer of body weight into momentum (supported and directed by muscular tension and extension). Ballistic strikes operate by allowing both flexors and extensors to remain relaxed, as Vieux Normand explained; the arm (assuming we're still talking about punching) is effectively a dead weight, unsupported by the muscular tension required to maintain linear skeletal alignment. It's like a medieval ball-and-chain, as opposed to a battering ram.

The intermediary step would be something like a shovel hook, the main difference being that a hook is typically thrown with enough tension to retain skeletal alignment (i.e., to get the weight of the body more-or-less directly behind the punch) whereas the ballistic version is thrown with very little tension, the power being generated by a weight shift from foot to foot and delivered by a "dead arm" swing.

Frankly, both methods - the more orthodox, tension and alignment-based punch,and the ballistic punch - generate serious power. The ballistic punch doesn't require as much of a chamber and is optimized for sucker punch scenarios, which is (IMO) probably why it was originally favored in Systema (re. the historical connection between Systema and executive protection work)."
-dLlR

"China has the biggest pile of cash on the planet - $2 trillion worth. And it has more bright, well-educated engineers, accountants and economists than anywhere else... In fact, it has so many economists trained at Western universities, it is almost sure to blow itself up."

- Bill Bonner

"I've said this one way or the other for some time now. I can't for the life of me understand why people don't get it. These things are our birth right: Food, shelter, water, at a minimum. We're the only mammals ( western industrial), slaving for someone else, with no self sufficient means to acquire food, water , shelter ( without the aid of Wal-mart and Mc Donalds). Here's a true story I hope will open some people eyes.

In 1998, i was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Ivory Coast. i lived in a village of 1,500 people. 98% of the people lived in mud huts with Straw roofs. I lived in a cement block house with no running water, electricity, or any other amenities in I can think of, just four solid walls, and a roof over my head, plus a bed and mosquito net. Well, I basically observed that every man, women, and child in that village knew how to build their own mud hut (Adobe/cob), and all the materials were free from the forest or the village. On average, each house lasted about 30 years before they rebuilded, or longer. Every man woman, and child had access to the forest for any materials they wanted, also hunting rights, and rights to the wild bananas and other foods, if you could beat the monkeys to them. They all went to the their fields in the morning, a long walk, worked hard all day. They would come back home home to a natural home cooked meal, that took a lot of labor. Basicallly the women would spend all day fetching water, fire wood, and pounding and cooking food, by hand, or making oil, drying fish, and etc. Everyone was in great shape, all of those bastard guys had six packs ( So jealous). So i never saw these Aids, emaciated people they cover on the news. I wish i had paid more attention to how they bulit those houses then, I just kinda, took in life, and watched the world go by for three glorious years. One of the best experiences of my life. So this was in West Africa.

The other night, i went to visit a friend of mine. She lives in So Cal. Her husband is a Kenyan Bee keeper (Top Bar hives). They just had a baby. At any rate, they pulled out their front lawn, planted millet, tomatoes, and potatoes, in the back they planted kale, fruit trees , corn, and every thing else you can imagine, plus chickens. We were talking, and without comments from me, my friend's husband started talking about Kenya, and how they decided they wanted to go back, his wife is American ( White). So I asked why, hell I knew, just wanted to hear from them. He said, i have 30 acres of land in Kenya from my Grand father, my brother has another 30, i lived on the edge of lake victoria, I have access to fish, and farmalnd. One months rent here, would be enough to live like a king in my home land. And besides, we don't talk about living green in my home, we are Green. When we build a mud house, we know it's is not permanent, and nothing will be left behind, the mud and straw will eventually return to the Earth, after 30 years or so. No trace of me or anyone else. Why should we have permanent buildings like you guys in the US, when we ourselves are not permanent, i don't understand these houses/buildings in the States.

Well, he didn't have to convince me, i saw what he was talking about 11 years ago on the opposite side of the continent, but it made me think about our predicament even more. I think the meek may really inherit the earth. All the countries which have been abused by Western powers via: Slavery, coloniazation, neo coloniazation, Unfair extractions of natural resources, and etc. . These countries have been denied fossil fuels essentially when you really look at it. Therefore, they've been forced to live at a very local level, building their own house and etc. They are already ready living in Peak oil for the most part. If life is a ten story building, and The US is on the 10th floor, and back woods African countries are on the first first floor. Tell me, who has farther to fall in a post industrial world? We do of course, maybe we get what we deserve, maybe this is karma working itself out? i don't know, but what I do know is that eventually, the cultures which have maintained their ability to construct housing , farm,. and etc without fossil fuels will inherit the earth,. May it be so. My ten cents."

- internet post from somebody