Paul M. Jones

Also, have a gun. It will make you more effective if you have to fight.

His courage might have been more effective if he'd had a gun.

One victim, Satwant Singh Kaleka, died valiantly trying to fight off the gunman. He put his life on the line to try to save others.

via The 6 Sikh temple shooting victims identified; Satwant Singh Kaleka died trying to fight off shooter | Twitchy.

It’s so technical. It looks so effortless when you do it right, and when you do it wrong it looks like it’s really, really heavy. There’s this thing called weightlessness. When you get a good lift the bar is literally weightless. It’s off your body and you don’t feel it until it’s over your head. You get that with maybe one in 100 lifts, but when you get it you’ll chase it for the rest of your life.

Did I mention it's a woman? Great article. Via An Olympic Weightlifter on Football, Breaking Windows and the Perfect Lift | Playbook | Wired.com.

YOU’RE WORKING UP AN APPETITE

Part of the problem is what scientists refer to as ‘compensation’.

There is no doubt exercise burns calories, but at the kind of level most of us work out, it also stimulates hunger.

The more moderate activity we do, the more we eat, effectively cancelling out the weight loss benefits.

Linia Patel, a sports dietician with the British Dietetic Association, says it’s a misnomer that exercise is a green light to increase the calories.

‘Appetite often soars when you exercise a lot,’ Patel says. ‘You need to make sure you  eat enough, but stop before you get to the point where you aren’t burning excess energy off.’

Your body is not a machine; it has complex feedback loops. This is why the "calories-in calories-out" hypothesis is naive, at best. Via Why going to the gym can make you FAT | Mail Online.

The clash between the township of Mount Holly and the working-class, mostly minority residents of this neighborhood of rowhouses has dragged on for 10 years. The township wants to give the land to a private developer. The residents want to remain in the homes they've owned for decades.

...

Beginning in 2008, Mount Holly engaged in increasingly harsh tactics to encourage the holdout residents to leave. The township ripped up hunks of sidewalks, then left them unrepaired; it issued a round of warnings for trifling code violations; it cut off electricity to neighborhood street lights at night; it shut down a playground and a community center; and it reduced public services like policing, trash collection, transportation and school busing. But the demolitions hit residents hardest. The township has been tearing down rowhomes that still have occupants living in the homes connected to them. When bulldozers rip away individual houses, adjacent homes suffer collateral damage. There are holes in walls of the remaining homes, as well as a loss of insulation.

"Demolition would happen especially before holidays," Cruz says. "They'd do their work before Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Christmas Eve, and then leave the bulldozers out and about over the holidays, just to intimidate you."

via New Jersey Town Rips Up Working-Class Neighborhood For Private Developers.

What we’re actually witnessing -- and have been for years now -- is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility by Congress and the president for performing the most basic responsibilities of government. Despite the fiscal crisis that Washington knows will occur if it fails to deal with unsustainable spending and debt, it hasn’t managed to produce a federal budget in more than three years. 

To their credit, House Republicans have drafted, voted on, and passed a budget, but they are busy now trying to worm their way out of the very spending cuts -- the sequestration deal -- they insisted on as a condition for raising the debt limit last summer. 

One of the most egregious failures of the president’s budget was that it, as in his previous budgets, offered no serious plan to stabilize the largest entitlement programs. Instead, the president and congressional Democrats lambasted Republicans for actually addressing the problem in their budget. 

The plain fact is that neither party is working honestly to tackle the nation’s fiscal issues. Why stick your neck out when it’s easier to just blame the other side?

via Congress isn’t gridlocked -- it’s just totally irresponsible - The Hill - covering Congress, Politics, Political Campaigns and Capitol Hill | TheHill.com.

I understand there has been a ton of people (even more than normal) eating at Chick-Fil-A today. The news reporting narrative has been "customers showing up in support of the CEO's stance in favor of traditional marriage."

I'm not sure that's entirely true. I'll be going for dinner tonight, but it will be because I'm *against* the dictator-like pronouncements of the mayors and aldermen threatening to deny the business permits to operate. I wonder how many others supporting Chick-Fil-A today share my opinion?

In May 2007, my husband and I were asked to assist an acquaintance in putting down a 14-year-old dog because the owner was not strong enough to do so on her own. As we own several dogs and cannot bear to see an animal suffer, we agreed.

The teenaged daughter of the dog's owner witnessed this discussion and protested the plan vehemently. One week later, the day before the planned euthanasia, a county police officer and an investigator stood on my front porch. The investigator who whisked my husband of 15 years into his vehicle told him that the girl had accused him of touching her.

My husband was never alone with the girl. He is a moral and truthful man. We were shocked by this claim but certain that nothing could or would come of it. Unfortunately, we were wrong.

This is old (2010) but still relevant. Yes, girls (and women) *do* lie about this stuff to get what they want. Via Sex offender registry: The result of legislative predator hysteria | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com.

"I am very happy and give thanks to our Great Leader for giving me the strength to lift this weight. I believe Kim Jong Il gave me the record and all my achievements. It is all because of him," Om said.

North Korean athletes habitually heap praise on their former leader, Kim, and when weightlifter Pak Hyon Suk won the women's 63-kilogram division in Beijing four years ago, she said she was 'overjoyed' by the fact that she had brought joy to Kim. (ANI)

via North Korean weightlifter credits Kim Jong Il for world-record feat of lifting thrice his weight - Yahoo! News India.

The libertarianism of Rand (and she hated the word “libertarian”) was based on an economics of resentment of the “moochers” and “loafers,” the sort of thing that leads one to call a book The Virtue of Selfishness. Friedman’s libertarianism was based on an economics of love: for real human beings leading real human lives with real human needs and real human challenges. He loved freedom not only because it allowed IBM to pursue maximum profit but because it allowed for human flourishing at all levels. Economic growth is important to everybody, but it is most important to the poor. While Friedman’s contributions to academic economics are well appreciated and his opposition to government shenanigans is celebrated, what is seldom remarked upon is that the constant and eternal theme of his popular work was helping the poor and the marginalized. Friedman cared about the minimum wage not only because it distorted labor markets but because of the effect it has on low-skill workers: permanent unemployment. He called the black unemployment rate a “disgrace and a scandal,” and the unemployment statute the “most anti-black law” on the books with good reason. He talked about two “machines”: “There has never been a more effective machine for the elimination of poverty than the free-enterprise system and a free market.” “We have constructed a governmental welfare scheme which has been a machine for producing poor people. . . . I’m not blaming the people. It’s our fault for constructing so perverse and so ill-shaped a monster.”

via Milton Friedman: An Economics of Love - By Kevin D. Williamson - Exchequer - National Review Online.