The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread

[213374U]

 

http://www.iflscience.com/brain/most-psychology-papers-cant-be-reproduced

 

 

 

An attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies published in leading journals couldn't match the results in almost two thirds of cases. The findings raise serious questions about the rigor of research in the field, as well as how other areas of science would stack up under the same test.

 

 

 

Haha, as if psychology needed any more scrutiny as a "science".

 

Funny, though. "Almost two thirds" is roughly the same acceptance rate as for the bogus papers in the "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" sting. I'm thinking the concern shouldn't be as much about the science itself as about the standards of the journals in question...

[Azdeus]

Haha, as if psychology needed any more scrutiny as a "science".

 

Funny, though. "Almost two thirds" is roughly the same acceptance rate as for the bogus papers in the "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" sting. I'm thinking the concern shouldn't be as much about the science itself as about the standards of the journals in question...

 

I heard about this from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe and also about a peer review scandal a while back where alot of articles were retracted, so there are good proper journals out there aswell. That peer review sting was focused on journals that get paid to publish from the authors. I'm not terribly surprised about the findings really.

[ManifestedISO]

Best shirt design of the year came today. Because Natasha. 

 

[globalCooldown]

Molotov ****tails

Looks like we have a case of the "clbuttic mistake"

[Darkpriest]

1st

 

This made me chuckle a bit... it is either a really funny fake, or she is so naive, that's simply super funny...

 

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-buzz/pregnant-french-tourist-reaches-out-to-internet-to-172926385.html

 

 

2nd... Take that feminizm :D

 

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/this-california-law-is-helping-men-213035804.html

[Volourn]

First one is an admitted fake. It was advertisment for city. L0L

 

Second one, l0l, the double standard butthurt there. I don't really agree with their tatics but what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

 

I love how it shows sexism is not a male only disease. Also, it shows SJWIsm is also a disease that effects anyone of any gender. LMAO

[Amentep]

Fake - https://ca.news.yahoo.com/pregnant-tourist-claimed-searching-one-090350065.html

[Raithe]

Drone flyby of the new Apple Campus 2 under construction...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FqH02gN29o

[Hurlshort]

That is just a few miles from my work.

[Azdeus]

2nd... Take that feminizm :D

 

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/this-california-law-is-helping-men-213035804.html

 

Dudes who go around abusing the law and fishing for settlement money is a strike against feminazis? Really? This is some blackbelt level retard-fu.

[Raithe]

Okay then...

North Carolina High School Quaterback and Girlfriend charged as Adults for exchanging nude photos

 

 

 

A North Carolina high school quarterback is facing felony charges after allegedly exchanging nude photos with his girlfriend.

Cormega Copening, 17, and his girlfriend, Brianna Denson, 16, were charged as adults in February for sending 'sexually explicit' photos of minors - themselves, when they were 16 years old - to each other's cellphone. 

 

Denson reached a plea deal in July, but Copening has a court appearance next month and if convicted, he will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. 

 

It is illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to send or receive sexually explicit photos with a cell phone in North Carolina. A person can be charged with both sending and possessing photos. 

 

The age of consent to have sex in North Carolina, however, is 16 years old, which means the couple could have sex with one another, but could not sent nude photos to one another.  
 

The charges stem from an incident dating back to October 2014, when Copening was a student at Douglas Byrd High School in Fayetteville. The teen transferred to Jack Britt High School

 

'In North Carolina you are considered an adult at 16 years old as far as being charged,' Sgt Sean Swain of the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department told Fox News. 'But to disseminate and receive sexually explicit texts, photos or videos, you must be over 18.'

 

Copening has been benched from his upcoming football game and is under investigation because both schools claim they were unaware of the charges until a couple weeks ago.

 

Officers said the sexting charges came about when police took Copening's phone while investigating another incident.  

'We seized his phone and while our investigators went through the phone they saw there were photos of himself and another person on the phone,' Swain told WTVD.  

 

Leon Mack, director of student activities for the Cumberland County Schools, released a statement about the incident.  

'Both Douglas Byrd and Jack Britt high schools did not violate eligibility requirements, and that neither school was made aware of the felony charges against the student,' the statement read. 

 

Copening was charged with two counts of second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor and three counts of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor after authorities found the nude images he and his girlfriend exchanged. 

 

Each count is a felony charge that carries at least two years in jail. 

The quarterback also faces the possibility of becoming a registered sex offender, which many experts say is unfair and the result of a poorly written law that declares its residents adults at 16 years old. 

 

Denson took a plea deal on a misdemeanor charge of 'disseminating harmful material to minors' in July, according to Mic. 

District Court Judge Stephen Stokes sentenced her to one year of probation, a $200 fine, a class on how to make smarter life decisions and no phone access during her probation period.   

 

 

 

 

 

[Raithe]

And for the not so serious...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QajyNRnyPMs

[ManifestedISO]

What the ... stove top just died. No power. No heat, nothing. Toaster works. Coffee-maker light still on. Checked the breaker box with the flashlight Wals made me buy--which works great by the way--it's not the fuses. Frickin' thing just took a 220-amp dirt nap. I had a whole pan of spicy chicken noodle on the stove ... went to stir it at the regular interval: cold as the air temperature at 21:00 hours in September.

 

I am eating this soup anyway, with a few pepper jack crackers.  

[ShadySands]

Heroic Homeless Man Gave His Life To Save A Woman Being Held Hostage

[Raithe]

So....
 
Rupert Murdoch just bought National Geographic
 

The National Geographic magazine has been a nonprofit publication since inception in 1888, but that ends today. The long-running American publication becomes very much for-profit under a $725 million dollar deal announced today with 21st Century Fox, the entertainment company controlled by the family of Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch is a notorious climate change denier, and his family's Fox media empire is the world's primary source of global warming misinformation. Which would be no big deal here, I guess, were it not for the fact that the National Geographic Society's mission includes giving grants to scientists.
 
Or had you forgotten? Here's a refresh for you, a fun little interview with Murdoch on his climate change views.
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3plf1VGlccM
 
From today's deal coverage in WaPo:

The partnership, which will also include the National Geographic cable channel and the National Geographic Society’s other media assets, will be called National Geographic Partners. Fox will own 73 percent of the partnership, and Washington-based National Geographic Society will own the balance. Fox will pay $725 million to the Society for its stake in the partnership. This will push the Society’s endowment to more than $1 billion.
 

Let the “National Geographic Covers Designed by Rupert Murdoch” Photoshop Wars begin.
 
20-year Nat Geo vet Declan Moore becomes CEO. Gary Knell, president-CEO of the Society, will serve as the first chairman. Buried in the press announcement:
 
“The value generated by this transaction, including the consistent and attractive revenue stream that National Geographic Partners will deliver, ensures that we will have greater resources for this work, which includes our grant making programs that support scientists and explorers around the world,” Knell said. “As media organizations work to meet the increasing demand for high quality storytelling across multiple platforms, it’s clear that the opportunity to grow by more closely aligning our branded content and licensing assets is the right path. We now will have the scale and reach to continue to fulfill our mission long into the future. The Society’s work will be the engine that feeds our content creation efforts, enabling us to share that work with even larger audiences and achieve more impact. It’s a virtuous cycle.”
So Rupert Murdoch will be to some large extent controlling a $1 billion organization whose stated mission includes giving grants to scientists.
Rupert Murdoch is a raging ****, but he is also a very much on-the-record climate change denier. A climate change denier with now even more power and influence over science grants in the United States.

[ShadySands]

[Raithe]

For one perspective on this...

 

The Federalist - Expel People Who Demand Trigger Warnings

 

 

 

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Foundation for Individual Rights in Education President Greg Lukianoff recently wrote a tour de force of an article entitled, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In response, Maddy Myers of The Mary Sue wrote an article so petulant it verges on self-parody. Worse yet, it is insulting to the readers’ intelligence, insofar as Myers apparently believes that an article coauthored by a decades-long veteran of studying psychology (Haidt) simply suffers from a failure to understand post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

 

Among the more amusing bits of Myers’ non-response is an admission that she “[doesn’t] have evidence back up [her] claims of how these warnings work,” but does have “a lot of anecdotal stories from friends about how they have trouble predicting what will ‘set off’ their anxiety.” The crux of her argument (to the extent she can be flattered with such a term) seems to be this:

 

 

 

This is just one in a long line of misunderstandings on the part of older college professors who actually just seem angry at the ‘political correctness’ their modern students have begun to demand. They may try to characterize us as literal babies, but they’re the ones who look like babies to me, given the refusal to acknowledge their students’ experiences. They can’t be bothered to make small changes to their own curriculums that might better facilitate conversations among their students about media depictions of violence, rape, assault, war, kidnapping, and so on.

I like the idea of trigger warnings, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not sure they do much to protect people from panic attacks. Unfortunately, almost no articles that discuss trigger warnings seem particularly interested in centering the experiences of people with anxiety and PTSD, and how those people might be better served by institutions and classes that they’re paying thousands and thousands of dollars to attend.

 

 

 

In other words, how can you be so cruel as to expect these students to engage with knowledge as it actually exists? They’re just trying to get the degrees they paid for in peace. Leave them alone.

 

What I am about to write may come off to many people as cruel. As such, I feel it necessary to begin by stating that I write this piece as a victim of childhood abuse who still suffers some degree of PTSD from the experience. I won’t claim it’s nearly as bad as that experienced by, say, combat veterans, although unlike Myers and her “abusive relationship,” I do have a window into PTSD that severe—namely, the very man who abused me: my father.

 

My Experience With PTSD

You see, my father had severe PTSD from his time as a Green Beret during the Vietnam War. It is probably at least partially because he refused to seek treatment for it that I ended up suffering the same thing to a lesser degree.

 

My father’s PTSD transformed him into an erratic, explosive, psychologically abusive man who instilled paranoid fantasies in me about everyone, including my own mother, starting when I was at the tender age of five. To make sure I never questioned these ideas, he punished any signs of critical thinking with almost Maoist tactics of repression. He also sweetened his psychological poison pill by alternating his rages and interrogations with grandiose flattery designed to make me even more dependent on his fantasies. Thankfully, my mother kicked him out when I was seven, but to this day I find it difficult to fully trust many people because of the pure paranoia I was forced to experience and embrace at an early age.

 

I don’t bring this up for pity. I bring it up because I know what it is to be triggered, and to have to fight your way past a psychological gag reflex that you never wanted, but that the dual cruelties of fate and another person’s mental illness imposed on you.

 

It is because I know this that I must write this article. In the past few years, I have seen the markers of a disorder I have learned to live with cynically twisted into a political cudgel by the radical Left, as well as a number of people I can only believe are still too deluded by their own continued suffering to realize what a mockery and an insult their cause is to their fellow sufferers. I don’t know which of these categories Myers fits into, but, frankly, it doesn’t matter. A snake-oil salesman is a snake-oil salesman, even if she believes the snake oil works.

 

Leave College If You Can’t Take It

Let’s get back to Myers’ “just let the poor traumatized kids get the degrees they paid for” argument. No, don’t let them get those degrees. The whole point of those degrees is to signify their bearers possess qualities beyond merely the credit rating to take out vast amounts of student loans. The entire reason college degrees are supposed to be valuable is that they signify a capacity to absorb and process specialized knowledge beyond what non-degree-holders have. This is, in fact, the whole purpose of education generally.

 

This means if some troubled or weak students have allowed their mental illness to preclude them from absorbing such knowledge, the fault lies not with the college, but with them. Such people are as ineducable as an illiterate English major. The solution is not to expel knowledge from the classroom that is disagreeable to these feeble and fragile minds. It is to expel them. Their place is in a psych ward, not a school, and their money (or, more likely, their parents’) is better spent seeking treatment there than spoiling education for everyone else.

 

I am not exaggerating when I say that the stigma attached to mental illness exists at least partially because “sufferers” exhibit these sorts of cognitive glass jaws. Why should you be willing to spend time around someone prone to breaking down and blaming you at any moment, let alone take responsibility for them as an employer, supervisor, or especially the sort of educator-****-substitute-parent that many college administrations try to be? In our lawsuit-happy culture, there is no reason for any rational being to want anyone who is mentally ill nearby if their most visible “advocates” are so fragile they want to see a Shakespeare play labeled like a pack of cigarettes.

 

You’re Harming People Who Have Real Problems

This stigma is more than just an insult to people who do their best not to permit their mental illnesses to affect their lives. It also permits some senseless and unenlightened policies at universities. Witness Yale University’s policy on mental health, which seems to treat everyone with mental illness—even those who want to do nothing but learn in order to escape the circumstances that led to it—as a potential lawsuit. The result? Anyone who shows signs of mental fragility—even when he doesn’t permit it to affect his coursework—gets quietly suspended as a precautionary measure to avoid liability.

 

This policy has already led to one suicide by a suspended student and a pervasive culture among Yale students of not reporting their mental-health issues, which should surprise no one. But can we truly say it is irrational if the trigger-warning proponents are right that any mentally ill student who reads “Titus Andronicus” is liable to suffer a panic attack or become suicidal? If that’s true, the only rational response for educators is simply to either avoid contact with the mentally ill, or to shy away from teaching anything that might possibly implicate the darker side of human existence.

 

This is why colleges like Yale drive their students to suicide rather than risk a lawsuit, and why college professors fear that teaching “triggering” material might prematurely end their careers. In the guise of sensitivity, mental-health “activists” have convinced them that sufferers are ticking time bombs.

 

I hope that I speak for many, many other people who’ve dealt with mental illness when I say we are not so easily exploded, and many of us, especially those who have been acutely afflicted, resent the hell out of being portrayed that way. I refuse to give people who spread this meme of the easily breakable sufferer even the benefit of praising their noble or empathetic intentions. What they offer is not compassion, but idle, sniveling condescension disguised as such.

 

Can’t Handle the Heat, Get Out of College

To give one example of just how insulting these coddlers can get, consider the following argument that many proponents of trigger warnings have voiced to me: “Surely,” they say, “you wouldn’t throw spiders at an arachnophobe and claim it’s defensible behavior? How is bombarding people with triggers in a classroom any different?”

 

Setting aside how infantilizing the logic is, the problem with this logic is its generalization onto the classroom, which comes equipped with a few implicit expectations about your ability to absorb information. Sure, one might not throw spiders at an arachnophobe in a social setting, but when an arachnophobe decides to major in entomology, he forfeits his right to complain about seeing spiders.

 

Yet this style of argument clearly rings a chord with some people who suffer from mental illness. This is depressing, but also helpful, for it gives us a much clearer sign of who the ineducable and broken among us are. When they lend their support to the professional coddlers masquerading as “activists,” they advertise their presence.

 

Like it or not, the activists have done us a service in flushing them out, as surely as the exterminator does a service by drawing out termites. The “victims” they hold up as poster children should be the first people that colleges suspend, expel, or forcibly commit to whatever mental-health facilities they retain. This will take the stigma away from most mental-health sufferers and put it firmly where it belongs: with the ones whose inability to hack it in an educational setting is so all-consuming that they can’t stop talking about it.

 

Sick People Need Treatment, Not Trigger Warnings

Is this cruel? No. What is cruel is leaving people that troubled without treatment, and then expecting them to survive in institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to seeking truth. It is true that some people are so damaged that, in the immortal words of Col. Nathan R. Jessup, they “can’t handle the truth.”

 

It’s not fair to the colleges or to them to expect them to hack it any more than it’s fair to expect someone with easily broken bones to become a body builder. Either the college will have to dumb its educational mission down to the point of meaninglessness, or the extremely damaged will have to put themselves at risk of interminable mental agony. The first option destroys learning; the second destroys people. Better to keep the people incapable of learning away from it.

 

I know what it is to be triggered. I also have never resented a professor for not warning me in advance. If anything, I was grateful. For me, something being triggered was a bright flashing arrow indicating precisely what I most needed to work on to be able to live a normal life and cease permitting my painful past to control me. Seeing that truth and your own disorders don’t line up can be frightening or liberating; often both at the same time. Like Plato’s philosopher, whose eyes burn in the light of the sun when he first emerges from the cave, stripping away your own mental illness’ illusions can be very painful. As in Plato, it is also worth it.

 

But if you can’t brave that light, you don’t deserve it. If you need trigger warnings in order to learn, then the only warning we should hear is a warning against letting you in the classroom. There will always be those who prefer to be lost, but we don’t need to burn maps to accommodate them. To get back to educating students, colleges need to understand that some would prefer to remain lost in a dark wood of error. For those students, there can be only one option, and it is to inscribe above the campus gates the only warning the ineducable deserve to read:

 

Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

 

 

 

 

[Malcador]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iB9QYaSVEo

[Gorgon]

[Raithe]

Some good habits to consider...

 

The Child is the Father to the Man

 

 

 

Awhile back I was driving through the place where I grew up – Edmond, Oklahoma – and happened to pass by my old high school. This wasn’t an unusual event; I now live just an hour and a half from Edmond and my parents still reside there, so I’m back fairly frequently and sometimes pass the school. But this time something was different. On past occasions, I would be hit with a rush of nostalgia and memories of my days there would vividly come back to me. This time, however, I felt…nothing. Cognitively I thought, “There’s my old high school,” but no emotional wires were tripped. It seemed like just another building – my feeling of strong personal connection to it had disappeared.

 

As I drove on and contemplated this change and the distance I realized I now felt towards my youth in general, a quote from Theodore Roosevelt I had read years earlier came back to me: “The child is father to the man.” When I first came across the quote, it had puzzled me. I couldn’t really grasp what it meant. But as I drove past the home of the Edmond North Huskies, I began to understand it.

 

Roosevelt, I learned, was not the originator of the quote – he was in fact referencing a poem by William Wordsworth:

 

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

What Wordsworth had in mind with these lines is the idea that a man’s passions, interests, curiosity, and penchant for awe and wonderment are born in youth and run an unsevered thread into adulthood. While some adults forgot the childlike joy of their younger years, Wordsworth believed it was still within them waiting to be rediscovered.

 

This is a worthy idea, and one that few men embraced with the vigor of Theodore Roosevelt, who bounded through his entire life with an unflagging boyish enthusiasm. But when TR professed that the child is the father of the man, he had something much different in mind, as he writes in his autobiography:

 

“Looking back, a man really has a more objective feeling about himself as a child than he has about his father or mother. He feels as if that child were not the present he, individually, but an ancestor; just as much an ancestor as either of his parents.  The saying that the child is the father to the man may be taken in a sense almost the reverse of that usually given to it. The child is father to the man in the sense that his individuality is separate from the individuality of the grown-up into which he turns. This is perhaps one reason why a man can speak of his childhood and early youth with a sense of detachment.”

 

At a certain point in your life — if you’re like me, it will happen in your late twenties — you will begin to experience the phenomenon of which TR speaks. The person you were as a boy and a young man will begin to seem like another individual, rather separate from your grown-up self. It’s a strange thing to experience. It’s not that you lose memories of your past, or necessarily let go of the youthful ideals and traits that Wordsworth cherished, but simply that your boyhood self and your current self come to seem like two distinct individuals.

 

Why does this cleaving between youth and adulthood occur? Surely some of it can be chalked up to the simple passage of time; as you grow older, your memories, and thus the attachment you feel to your past, become hazier. But it is also likely has its roots in neurology. As we discussed in our post about twentysomethings, your brain does not finish “setting up” until around your mid-twenties, which is also — not coincidentally, I would argue — around the time that your youthful self will begin to seem more like a distinct entity. The brain of your youth is not the brain of your adulthood, and the latter can remember and view the former almost as an outside observer.

 

What Kind of Man Are You Going to Father?

All this may be interesting to ponder, but it also has two practical implications that are vital for young men to understand.

First, what your present self wants and desires probably isn’t going to be what your future self wants and desires. When we’re young, we’re typically more present-focused. We worry about what can give us pleasure NOW and not ten years from now. So we spend money instead of save it, eat like crap, and play video games all night long, instead of eating right, exercising, and seeking experiences that will grow our minds and character. Sure, pleasure-oriented pursuits feel good in the moment, but our future selves will probably prefer to have more money in the bank and less blubber around our mid-sections.

 

Second, at this very moment, you are creating or “fathering” the man you will be in five, ten, and twenty years. So you want to be a successful, financially secure, physically fit, and well-adjusted forty-year-old? What actions are you taking NOW as a twenty-year-old to father that man? Just like one day you’ll need to be intentional about fathering your biological children, right now you need to be intentional about fathering your future self. Will you be an absentee dad who leaves your 30-year-old self feeling lost and adrift? Or will you raise a man who is intelligent, virtuous, and able to tackle life with confidence and vigor? No one can control the kind of biological father they are born with. But every young man can strive to be the best possible father to his future self.

 

Doing this doesn’t mean taking life too seriously and eschewing the fun you should be having as a young adult. It simply means establishing a set of foundational habits that will serve you well now and that you will thank yourself for later.

 

As we explored in our series on your twenties, after your brain finishes developing, changing your habits, while still possible, becomes harder. For this reason, your youth is the best and easiest time to transform yourself into the man you want to become. The positive habits you create as a young man will become a solid foundation you can build on for the rest of your life. What’s more, research has found that simply imagining yourself as an old person can increase your chances of establishing positive habits, like saving money. 

 

Below are nine foundational habits that will help every young man raise himself right.

 

1. Save 20% of Your Money  

Many young men will say to themselves that when they finally start making “real” money then they’ll start saving. If only that were true. In a post on the financial regrets of college graduates, we mentioned that the majority of men coming out of school wish they had started saving sooner. It may seem hard when you don’t have much income, but like anything, starting small will increase your chances of future success exponentially.

 

Make it a habit right now, no matter what your paycheck is, to put 20% of your after-tax income into savings. The easy way to do it is to set up an automatic transfer from your checking account to your savings account the day after you get paid. That way, it comes right out of your account just like a bill, and you don’t even have to think about it. Don’t be among the 25% of Americans who don’t save at all. If you own a car or a home, you know how stressful it can be when things inevitably go awry – the air conditioner goes out, a tire gets punctured. There’s a great sense of relief (and even pride) when you have the cash to handle it instead of using credit.

 

2. Exercise Daily  

Regular exercise provides a boatload of benefits — from improving cardiovascular health, to fighting stress and depression, to increasing testosterone. Thus, there are few habits that will better ensure a lifetime of success and well-being than making a daily workout a non-negotiable part of your life. Instead of trying to get on the exercise wagon when you’re a tired, out-of-shape, middle-aged man with a lot of responsibilities and very little time, make it a habit now when you’re at the top of your game. Regular exercise is a tough routine to start, but once it becomes a solid habit, most people continue with it indefinitely. The physical and psychological benefits become almost impossible to give up.

 

3. Eat Healthy

If you want to avoid becoming a pot-bellied man, you need to establish good eating habits today. Research has shown again and again that diet is the biggest factor in maintaining a healthy weight. Unfortunately, many young men develop poor eating habits in high school and college. With all-you-can-eat cafeterias and vending machines all over campus, it’s easy for a poor diet to become the norm. You can often get away with subsisting on pop tarts and pizza for a while because of your scorching metabolism. But as you age and that metabolism slows down, the junk food diet catches up with you and the pounds start piling on. Develop healthy eating habits now, so you don’t have to struggle to do a one-eighty when you’re facing down your ten-year reunion with a 40-inch waist. Healthy eating doesn’t have to be complicated; for a good place to start, check out Steve Kamb’s easy to follow guide to the paleo diet over on Nerd Fitness.

 

4. Plan Weekly and Daily

If I were asked which habit has contributed most to my success and well-being as an adult, I’d have to say weekly and daily planning. The power of planning lies in the perspective and control it provides for your life; it gives you both a broad, birds-eye view of the maze that must be navigated to achieve your long-term goals, and the ability to manage the small, day-to-day tasks that are essential to reaching those aims. Without daily and weekly planning, you end up getting distracted, forgetting what you need to do, and ending each day with the restless anxiety born from knowing you pretty much wasted your daylight – again.

 

5. Read for Pleasure

Readers are leaders. If you talk to principals and teachers they often say that nothing predicts a student’s success as well as whether or not they read independently. This isn’t very surprising – reading expands your mind and vocabulary, increases your creativity and empathy, and boosts your critical thinking skills and attention span. As a young man you’ll have plenty of required reading assignments for school, but be sure to also always be reading something for pleasure as well.

 

Not sure what book to pick up first? Check out our recommended reading lists and join the AoM book club.

 

6. Brush and Floss

This may sound like a silly habit to mention, but think about it: you only get one set of teeth during your lifetime. It’s not like losing hair or getting wrinkles which are largely cosmetic problems; there are all kinds of negative correlations to poor oral heath, including an increased risk of cancer. The Mayo Clinic even says that your oral hygiene and health offers a window to your overall health. Unless you want to drop a small fortune on fixing your cavities and eventually replacing them with veneers or dentures, you need to take care of the teeth (and gums) nature gave you. So brush those pearly whites two times daily and floss every night. Your future self will thank you every time he eats an apple or corn on the cob with aplomb.

 

7. Meditate

There is probably no habit more important for a young man in the 21st century to establish than daily meditation. With the constant barrage of distractions we’re subject to in the modern age, if you don’t learn to discipline your mind now, you can easily find yourself lying on your death bed reviewing your life, and seeing only visions of BuzzFeed and your iPhone flash before your eyes. Not only does meditation increase your willpower, but it also fights stress, improves your mental and physical health, and boosts your resiliency. And here’s even more proof that meditation will help your future self: recent studies have shown that regular meditation can slow down the onset of dementia.

 

Read our primer on meditation. It doesn’t take much to get started. Start off with 5 minutes a day and work your way up to 20 minutes a day. Lately I’ve been using calm.com for some fantastic (and free!) guided meditations.

 

8. Journal

When I did a book signing at the Tankfarm store back in May, an AoM reader and I chatted a bit about the importance of journaling. He made this rather rough, but astute analogy: “Your body takes a sh** to keep everything running smoothly. Every now and then your mind needs to take a dump, too. A journal is basically a toilet for the mind.”

Amen.

 

As I’ve admitted, I’m not the most regular journaler, but I always feel on top of my game when I’m consistent with it. There’s something cathartic about working out your problems with pen and paper. Whenever I’ve hit a wall in life, it’s often through journaling that I find the solution. Moreover, studies have shown that regular journaling improves your emotional and physical health.

 

Not only will your future self be grateful for the sense of well-being the journal habit will bring, he’ll also be thankful that he has a catalog of all the important events that have occurred in his life. I know from my own experience that I enjoy reading my journals from my high school and college days. It allows me to relive those important moments in my life, reminds me of the youthful ideals and goals I don’t want to lose sight of, and provides me with perspective on how much I’ve progressed as a man.

 

9. Serve

I’m a big believer in the idea that service is the rent we pay for living on earth. In one way or another, we’ve all benefited from the work and sacrifice of generations before us and from the love and support of those around us. Give back by providing regular service.

 

The great thing about serving is that the more we give, the more we get. Service makes our lives more meaningful and is a potent antidote to the increasing narcissism in our culture.

 

 

[Raithe]

Hm, for those Arrow fans out there..

 

Arrow's Manu Bennett Arrested on Assault Charge

 

 

 

 

Slade Wilson is behind bars again but this time it wasn't Oliver Queen's doing.

 

Local reports from San Antonio say that Manu Bennett, who is in town for the Alamo City Comic Con, was arrested this weekend for an assault charge, which was originally called in as an "assault causing bodily injury," according to KENS5. The alleged assault took place at the Grand Hyatt hotel downtown.

 

Bennett is best known for his role as Slade Wilson/Deathstroke on CW's Arrow, however, he also played Azog in the Hobbit trilogy, Crixus on Spartacus, and Paco in 2007's The Condemned. 

 

No further details regarding the circumstances of the dispute have surfaced but Bennett was reportedly released on Sunday at 1 PM.

 

 

[Raithe]

Battle of Britain - 75 years on And He Still Wakes Every Day by 4am

 

 

 

At RAF North Weald in Essex, the day began at 3.30am, with the noise of the plane engines being warmed up. In the nearby huts, 12 pilots would be lying in bed – sometimes in pyjamas, some still in uniform – one ear listening for the telephone.

 

“We’d start getting information via the radar systems,” says Wing Commander Tom Neil, now 95 years old, and one of the last of the Few, the 3,000 young Allied Forces pilots who took part in the Battle of Britain between July and October 1940. There are only 20 of them thought to be left, but he is the last remaining Ace: a pilot who claimed five confirmed kills. Over the course of his dozens of missions, Tom brought down 14 enemy planes.

 

“The picture would be building up,” he continues. “Fifty bombers were taking off in Germany, they were being joined by fighter planes, there were 100, 200, 300. My God, they are coming in our direction.”

 

And then, as the young pilots started to eat breakfast, “invariably as the first morsel reached your lips the scramble would begin. The bell would sound, and you had three minutes to get to your aircraft, get in and take off.”

 

Today, as Wing Commander Neil of No. 249 Squadron watches the 75th commemorative flypast of 40 Hurricanes and Spitfires at Goodwood Aerodrome in Chichester, alongside Prince Harry, his mind will go back to those adrenalin-fuelled flights, the subject of his latest book, Scramble, a collection of his writings on his wartime career.

 

“You didn’t pay a great deal of attention to wind,” he goes on, “you didn’t have time. But you always had to consider the cloud – there’s always cloud above Britain. So you’d get into close formation, the closer, the better, and by the time you reach the Thames, you are at 12,000 feet, 13,000 feet… London drifts by on the right hand side. Then you’re off towards Maidstone, climbing to 14, 15, 16,000 feet, and you get directed towards the centre of Kent, and begin to look for the enemy. But you don’t see them. Too far away. Instead, you look for the black puffs of smoke caused by the anti-aircraft fire below. Then you’d turn your plane towards them, and eventually among the smoke, you’d suddenly see 30 to 40 bombers, and you’d be surrounded by fighters, perhaps more than 100 German planes in all. Look to your side, and there would be just 11 other chaps beside you.”

 

At this point, incredibly, says Wing Commander Neil, there is no apprehension or fear. “You are eager to see him and fight with him. You are not frightened, but exhilarated: let’s do it. So you launch at them, fire, break away, or dive, and reform to come back.”

 

The pilots who made up the Few – so-named by Winston Churchill – had to be incredibly efficient with their guns. “We only had 15 seconds’ worth of fire, which we deliver in three-second bursts. Then you would turn and go home.”

 

All the time, they would be attacked and harried by the enemy, in front and behind. “You see tracer bullets and cannon shells; sometimes you are hit. You don’t hear anything above the roar of your engine, but you feel the knock if a bullet hits home. It might even be from your own anti-aircraft flak. You get home and in 20 minutes the plane is rearmed and ready to fly again if the scramble sounds.”

 

Planes were taking off up to five times a day at the height of the battle in September 1940. Wing Commander Neil flew 20 days out of 31, 65 times in total that month. In the 16 weeks of the Battle of Britain, he took off 157 times.

 

Some had to bale out; he only parachuted once, when the rear section of his Hurricane was knocked off in a mid-air collision with another Englishman. 

 

“The plane was spinning out of control. At 1,500 feet, I got out with great difficulty” – he is 6’ 4” – “and was in my parachute for about two to three minutes, falling into a wood close to Maidstone. I came to in the mud, with two women and two men deciding what to do with me as they thought I was German. The men wanted to string me up; they were from the East End and weren’t friendly. But some army officers turned up and recognised I was British.”

 

Back at base, the beds in the officers’ hut would empty out constantly, but there was little time for grief. “You hardly knew anyone, there was no time to become close, and men wouldn’t come back for all kinds of reasons. They might just have baled out and taken a few days to get back to base. And we never saw the gory ends.

“Everybody had a different view; I was never terribly upset. When you are aged between 19 and 25, the body and mind can put up with anything.”

 

He recalls only two fears – being burned in his plane (Hurricanes were notorious, as the petrol tanks were situated just below the pilot so if hit, a blaze would engulf the ****pit immediately), and of drowning. “If you were hit over water, the Hurricane would sink like a stone. Even if you baled out, you wouldn’t get picked up, so would drown nonetheless.”

 

Wing Commander Neil ended up training the Americans, and took part in D-Day . He met his wife, WAAF officer Eileen Hampton, at Biggin Hill and they married in June 1945. Eileen, with whom he had three sons, two of whom went on to become pilots, died last year. (“We had 70 years of happy marriage…” he says, with pride.)

 

Even now, the Wing Commander has few regrets. “I was deeply privileged to be involved in the Battle of Britain,” he says. “I’ve had a wonderful life: sometimes dangerous, interesting, delightful, even.

 

“But I’m an old gentleman now – always awake at 4am. Other people were deeply affected by the war and still wake up screaming, but that never happens to me. But sometimes I think: did I do enough?”

 

 

[Raithe]

While the focus has been on American politics of late, lets throw in something from the UK side of it..
 
Why I've Finally Given Up On The Left
 
 

‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the fall of Marxist Leninism. ‘This pathetic small-minded jealousy of the anti-democratic bourgeois shows them up for the reactionary neocons they really are,’ a Guardian commenter told its columnist Rafael Behr after he had criticised Corbyn.
 
Not that they are careful about anything, or that they will take advice from me, but the left should be careful of what it wishes for. Its accusations won’t seem ridiculous soon. The one prophesy I can make with certainty amid today’s chaos is that many on the left will head for the right. When they arrive, they will be greeted with bogus explanations for their ‘betrayal’.
 
Conservatives will talk as if there is a right-wing gene which, like male-pattern baldness, manifests itself with age. The US leftist-turned-neocon Irving Kristol set the pattern for the pattern-baldness theory of politics when he opined that a conservative is a liberal who has been ‘mugged by reality’. He did not understand that the effects of reality’s many muggings are never predictable, or that facts of life are not always, as Margaret Thatcher claimed, conservative. If they were, we would still have feudalism.
 
The standard explanation from left-wingers is equally self-serving. Turncoats are like prostitutes, they say, who sell their virtue for money. They are pure; those who disagree with them are corrupt; and that is all there is to it. Owen Jones, who seems to have abandoned journalism to become Jeremy Corbyn’s PR man, offers an equally thoughtless argument. ‘Swimming against a strong tide is exhausting,’ he sighed recently. Leftists who stray from virtue are defeated dissidents, who bend under the pressure to conform. It won’t wash, particularly as Jones cannot break with the pressures that enforce conformity in his left-wing world and accept the real reason why many leave the left. It ought to be obvious. The left is why they leave the left. Never more so than today.
 
In the past, people would head to the exits saying, ‘Better the centre right than the far left.’ Now they can say ‘better the centre right than the far right’. The shift of left-wing thought towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic has been building for years. I come from a left-wing family, marched against Margaret Thatcher and was one of the first journalists to denounce New Labour’s embrace of corporate capitalism — and I don’t regret any of it. But slowly, too slowly I am ashamed to say, I began to notice that left-wing politics had turned rancid.
 
In 2007 I tried to make amends, and published What’s Left. If they were true to their professed principles, my book argued, modern leftists would search out secular forces in the Muslim world — Iranian and Arab feminists, say, Kurdish socialists or Muslim liberals struggling against reactionary clerics here in Britain — and embrace them as comrades. Instead, they preferred to excuse half the anti-western theocrats and dictators on the planet. As, in their quiet way, did many in the liberal mainstream. Throughout that period, I never heard the BBC demanding of ‘progressives’ how they could call themselves left-wing when they had not a word of comfort for the Iraqi and Afghan liberals al-Qaeda was slaughtering.

The triumph of Jeremy Corbyn has led to What’s Left sales picking up, and readers acclaiming my alleged prescience. Grateful though I am, I cannot accept the compliment. I never imagined that left-wing politics would get as bad as they have become. I assumed that when the criminally irresponsible Blair flew off in his Learjet, the better angels of the left’s nature would re-assert themselves.
 
What a fool I was.
 
Jeremy Corbyn did not become Labour leader because his friends in the Socialist Workers party organised a Leninist coup. Nor did the £3 click-activist day-trippers hand him victory. He won with the hearty and freely given support of ‘decent’ Labour members. And yes, thank you, I know all about the feebleness of Corbyn’s opponents. But the fact remains that the Labour party has just endorsed an apologist for Putin’s imperial aggression; a man who did not just appear on the propaganda channel of Russia, which invades its neighbours and persecutes gays, but also of Iran, whose hangmen actually execute gays. Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.
 
They don’t put it like that, naturally. Their first response is to cry ‘smear’. When I show that it is nothing of the sort, they say that he was ‘engaging in dialogue’, even though Corbyn only ever has a ‘dialogue’ with one side and his ‘engagement’ never involves anything so principled as robust criticism.
 
A few on the British left are beginning to realise what they have done. Feminists were the first to stir from their slumber. They were outraged this week when Corbyn gave all his top jobs to men. I have every sympathy. But really, what did they expect from a man who never challenged the oppression of women in Iran when he was a guest on the state propaganda channel? You cannot promote equality at home while defending subjugation abroad and it was naive to imagine that Corbyn would try.
 
The women’s issue nicely illustrates the damage he can do, even if he never becomes prime minister. When Labour shows by its actions that it doesn’t believe in women’s equality, the pressure on other institutions diminishes. Secularists and liberal Muslims will feel a different kind of prejudice. They will no longer get a hearing for their campaigns against forced marriage and sharia law from a Labour party that counts the Muslim Brotherhood among his allies.
 
The position of the Jews is grimmer still. To be blunt, the new leader of the opposition is ‘friends’ with men who want them dead. One Jewish Labour supporter told me, ‘I feel like a gay man in the Tory party just after they’ve passed Section 28.’ Another described his position as ‘incredibly exposed’. He had ‘come to understand in the last few weeks, quite how shallow the attachment of the left is to principles which I thought defined it.’ And yes, thank you again, I know at this point I am meant to say that Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite. Maybe he isn’t, but some of his best friends are, and the record shows that out of cynicism or conviction he will engage in the left’s version of ‘dog-whistle’ race politics.
 
I am middle-class and won’t suffer under the coming decade of majority Tory rule. Millions need a centre-left alternative, but I cannot see them being attracted by the revival of lumpen leftism either. Unlike their Scottish and French counterparts, the English intelligentsia has always had a problem with patriotism. Whenever this trend has manifested itself, voters have turned away, reasoning that politicians who appear to hate England are likely to have little time for the English.
 
By electing Corbyn, Labour has chosen a man who fits every cliché the right has used to mobilise working-class conservatism. In the 1790s, George Canning described the typical English supporter of the French Revolution ‘as a friend of every country but his own’. Today’s Tories can, with justice, say the same about Corbyn. George Orwell wrote of the ‘English intellectual [who] would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than of stealing from a poor box’. That came to mind on Tuesday when Corbyn declined to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at the Battle of Britain remembrance service.
 
I opened What’s Left with a quote by Norman Cohn, from Warrant for Genocide, his history of how the conspiracy theories that ended in fascism began in the dark, neglected corners of 19th-century Europe:

It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people.

In the years since What’s Left was published, I have argued that the likes of Corbyn do not represent the true left; that there are other worthier traditions opposed to oppression whether the oppressors are pro-western or anti-western. I can’t be bothered any more. Cries of ‘I’m the real left!’, ‘No I’m the real left!’ are always silly. And in any case, there is no doubt which ‘real left’ has won.
 
The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.
 
I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.
 
So, for what it is worth, this is my resignation letter from the left. I have no idea who I should send it to or if there are forms to fill in. But I do know this: like so many before me, I can claim constructive dismissal.

[Volourn]

British? POINT. NOT. FOUND.

[ShadySands]