Calisthenics

In the not so distant past, we humans of the third sphere, thought erroneously that dope buffness and freaky android super strength were merely for those who would meld with mechanism. That the 'trick' to looking and feeling like the human we wanted to be were to found in the clutches of semi-robotic exercise cages... that exercise looked like this:

Sophistry and conjecture.

We are the descendants of the most powerful organic system this planetary system has ever imagined into existence. Our inheritance is is this:

Herc's obliques spill over his illiac crest.

For the more slight of frame:

I ask you reader: tell me if either of these men look like the man in the machine. Further I ask: to what ideal do you aspire? I am fairly certain most men's ideal looks something like this:

Not Arnold.

Lean, mobile with well developed muscles of the abdomen, arms and shoulder girdle.

There is no coincidence that both of these men are upside down.

I will say now that one does not require machines, barbells, dumbbells, elastic bands or any kind of equipment whatsoever to become the beneficiary of their inheritance. All it takes are some very simple precepts.

Work all three body segments: upper, abdomen and lower.

This does not need to be complicated, for example one may choose to start with very basic exercises such as push ups and squats. It bears to keep in mind that push ups require holding a plank position and is a beginner level ab exercise. That you do the exercises is more important than choosing your program parameters perfectly.

Do only what you can do. Don't injure yourself.

A very important point here is to stay tight while doing high strength-skill exercises. If one is just starting, push ups may meet this criteria. Keep the armpits tight, clench the abs and glutes, try to make a fist even if one is performing an open hand variation and pull the kneecaps up. If you'd like to learn more about the skill of getting tight, read Pavel Tsatsouline's masterwork 'The Naked Warrior', the man is a genius.

Use high volumes of work. 

Exercise stress activates the the production of mRNA strands, the more strands present at any given time - the more structural adaptation there is to the imposed stress. There are two primary ways to produce high levels of epigenetic adaptation to exercise: impose high levels of acute stress as in, do few sets to circa-failure. Conversely one may do many sets without going to failure and increasing the time between sets.

If one chooses the first method, one is limited in the amount of volume they can perform by metabolic fatigue. Thus limiting their total production of messenger RNA.

If one performs a much higher volume of work by doing less repetitions per set, the trainee may perform double or more total mRNA encoding reps. This follows how humans tend operate naturally, if one were to climb a mountain or thresh grain by hand they would be very wise to pace themselves as the volume of work required is high and the prevention of metabolic and nervous fatigue is crucial to the successful completion of their task.

Gymnasts train for many hours per day, if they exhausted themselves too quickly they would be unable to perform all of the training required of their sport, they also posses some of the most developed male and female physiques on the planet.

A good method is to do one set of push ups and squats every hour for ten hours. Of course as one becomes more advanced they may choose to do an ab exercise as well.

Practice a wide variety of skills to prevent stagnation and increase strength-skill.

Muscular tension causes the activation of genes that result in adaptation to said tension, over time those levels of tension will cease to cause adaptation. This means that new and more intense stimulus must be introduced constantly to keep the body adapting. This is taken to non-functional extremes by some popular workout programs, a good reference to keep in mind is to practice exercises that are the same but different.

An example: if one were to follow the above push ups and squats program - one may choose to do normal push ups for one set an hour later do Russian push ups and the next do close grip push ups and so on. The exercise is the same but different. The varying levels of tension on different body structures will stimulate the expansion of neural nets and keep ones strength progressing.

Further by practicing a variety of skills, one works into more challenging exercises that are much more visually impressive and fun to perform. This tends to keep athletes interested in training.

Lose fat. You will automatically increase your power to weight ratio.

Body fat, while being unsightly is also a detriment to calisthenics performance as the increased resistance of non-functional bodymass impedes the performance of more complex and challenging exercises. This is why gymnasts, martial artists and rock climbers all try to stay as lean as possible. Increased work volume with no corresponding increase in caloric intake will serve reduce fat mass by itself.

The metabolic secretions produced by working muscle serve to increase human growth hormone levels - this hormone is correlated with decreased levels of body fat. Both the production of hGH and the concomitant decrease in body fat result in a favourable modification in the amount of circulating leptin, high levels of this hormone are correlated with overfeeding and poor nutrient partitioning causing more instances of over-eating and an increased propensity for excess calories to be stored as bodyfat as opposed to muscle mass.

This article is meant to be an introduction to the world of calisthenic training, it is by no means exhaustive of the topic. If one would like to learn more about exercises and their progressions, check this link out.

Flappy Bird: Earth with Humans v1.674927351(74)×10−27

Oooooooh - new Martian developments! This would be one of my faorite topics if it weren't for all the cranks and dumbasses involved in the field. I appreciate their curiosity and enthusiasm it's just that most of them are shockingly inept at coming to conclusions about things. Perhaps 'coming to conclusions' is the wrong phrase, lets say 'positing hypotheses based on available evidence'.

Fresh off the presses we have this fantastic new find:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1/m/3720/1M458433044EFFCEQKP2955M2M1.HTML

What you may or may not notice is that to the right of centre you'll see a circle with a cross in the centre. Everybody and their dog is jumping on the "valve handle" hypothesis. While it could be the remnant of a mechanical artifact (for all any of us know the picture is fake and there are no rovers on Mars) or perhaps it's evidence of 'aliens' in a different way....

You see there is such a thing as a trace fossil, something that while not intact has left a fossilized imprint of itself or a process for which it was responsible. Behold! examples:

Fossil? Yes - but I'll be damned if that doesn't look like a Yin/Yang with a crude Bagua.

Heel strike from a basketball shoe? Nope. Fossil.

Holy fucking black and white Batman... here let me infuse some 'kulahs':

Suck on that. BTW I saw your mom behind Taco Bell in handcuffs XD

Okay anyway, impressions can be left behind by various lifeforms that look to us to be of intelligent providence when in fact it was some stupid tubeworm fucking around 500 milliion years ago. Now it should be stated that I don't blame a tubeworm for the NASA shape, it could have been a sea star or urchin-like creature, it could be a valve handle, it could be celtic cross engraving left by time travelling Merovingians, how the fuck could I tell? For all I know space as we claim to understand it isn't real and there are no other planets and the Earth is flat.

All I'm saying, like with the 'dinosaurs are fake' thing, is: we don't know. All we have to go on is either our own direct experience or a priori conclusions which includes but is not limited to hearsay. One sucks totally and one is still quite dubious. Allow me to explain.

Explanation:
Direct experience is obviously the best of the two. After all experience is what the scientific method is based off of. The same scientific method that so many take to be a stifling and dogmatic religion all too unfortunately, anyway nonetheless it is an accepted method by which the likely truth of a matter is resolved. It's good enough for court, right?

Wrong. Don't get me started on court. The senses you use to experience the supposed outer reality are in fact synthetic. As in they are the synthesis of electrical inputs into your brain into something we can't find: experience. It's fascinating to me that people think they experience reality when they can't find what it is that experiences it. They say "brain, the brain experiences it" okay then why do brain dead cardiac patients see the room containing their switched off cadaver and can describe conversations the surgeons had while legally dead?

The structure of the brain does not account for experience, and I don't mean memory, I mean the active experiencer, that which experiences only the now (which is eternity really if you think about it: it's never not now...). Obviously this gets into some pretty fucky territory so I'll move on.

The point is that which you experience is a proxy assembled from electrons and the structure of the inside of your own brain, not reality. It is impossible to experience reality directly because it would seem the experiencer is not present in what we call reality, likely because physical reality is an illusion, or something. So to say: "FACT: ANYTHING" is a fallacy, it is at best a supposition.

If I were to choose a pop culture reference to what reality actually is, I'd choose this one:

Crude, yes, but I believe it gets the point across.... oh wait: humans.... crap.

It's likely that there is no physical universe as we think of physicality and what lies beneath is just information, the binary codices of some super intelligent macrobe to whom we are simply gut fauna and this, the dream dreamed collectively by our doubly helical processing core, spewing forth the  "Flappy Bird: Earth with Humans v1.674927351(74)×10−27" that is all we will ever experience as ourselves in this "place".

Keep fit and have fun, or don't: it's your fantasy.

Holy Fuck Boys: Dinosaurs are Fake!

I was listening to Liquid Stranger and reading this hilarious article in which the author postulates that there is in fact evidence to support a 'dinosaurs are fake' hypothesis, or at least illuminate the glaring and disturbing lack of transparency in palaeontology. Now I am not one to say something like the world was made by the Christian god five thousand years ago. Nor am I really in a position to refute that supposition other than by saying that if christians are made in the image of god then their god would have been too fucked in the head to have made a world as genuinely interesting as this one.

Lambastes aside, this article posits some interesting points in critical thought: if you have never seen a dinosaur bone, ever, because they are not on display to the public; how would you be able to verify their existence? Trust in an "expert" would be a priori and therefore inadequate to base any solid conclusions on. Beware how many of your supposed "truths" are in fact beliefs based on a priori conclusions. Lapses in logical thought land people in very embarrassing places.

Further incriminating the establishment is that they push the idea of something they refuse to validate with the supposed actual evidence, on children. Dinosaurs aren't being marketed on adults, they are categorically being pushed on kids. The old catholic motto of "get 'em while they're young" seems poignantly applicable here. Kids are the easiest to convince of anything and further, if you are able to keep your dubious narrative intact to about the time of young adulthood, diminishing mental plasticity will ensure the spurious engram remains intact throughout life.

Mental plasticity and the weaponized use of said is a huge topic that goes beyond the scope of this piece but I admonish the reader to learn about it for oneself.

It is important to realize that at the time of the creation of palaeontology there were other suspiciously insubstantive avenues of study being legitimized as "scientific". Egyptology comes to mind. The study of which, being far from a hard science like chemistry, was open to the rose coloured or, in this case opaque, interpretations of the data by arrogant primitive supremicists. The dogmatists of that era juxtaposed into the future would probably explain the Hoover Dam as a temple for pagan rituals to the river gods and posit the generators found within as "ceremonial objects".

Palaeontology is no different. It has has been twisted and molded to fit the conclusions of Charles Darwin. We now understand that Darwin was wrong and that punctuated equilibrium actually fits the evidence much better, leaving the question: why do people still believe in Darwin's crackpot theories? See above "get 'em while they're young" explanation and notice how effective it is.

If you'd like to learn more about the dubious nature of the studies of palaeontology, palaeoanthropology and anthropology, and the insane dogmatic narcissists found within, read the excellent (and scholarly) tome 'Forbidden Archaeology' by Michael Cremo. Prepare to be shocked, horrified and disgusted.

Again I should mention that I am neither for or against the dinosaurs are fake theory, I just realize that we, as people lacking direct experiential knowledge, should be not be dismissing such claims lightly. When it comes down to it, we must remember that we have no idea where we are, what we are doing here, what we are, what this place is or how any of this stuff got here. As such I find the idea of any man as an authority laughable: man has no clue about anything, not even himself, so who is anyone to say what is best for anyone else. I have digressed.

If you find yourself having an emotional reaction or really any reaction to the theory, ask yourself why. Why would you care? What does the existence of dinosaurs or non existence matter to your life? Perhaps you are uncomfortable for having believed something that it turns out could be totally bogus? Why do you feel insecure about that?

I certainly feel there is something very wrong in the gestalt of the academic study of anything anthro or paleo. There are too many people with large theosophical and personal investments who are more than happy to lie, both to themselves and to the public, about anything that doesn't fit.

Just keep in mind: we don't know shit.