Thursday, March 27, 2003

Okay, here goes. I’ve broken down the “fat burning” supplements into 7 categories (not in any particular order):

1. Ephedrine and Ephedra. Ephedrine and its herbal forms Ephedra and Ma Huang are often included in supplements designed to promote fat burning and/or energy. Ephedra has been in the news recently over the death of a baseball player (Steve Bechler) AND football player (Korey Stringer) during spring training, but it has not been conclusive.

2. Caffeine and Guarana. Caffeine and its herbal form Guarana are often included in supplements designed to promote energy and/or fat burning. Caffeine is also known to suppress the appetite.

3. Ephedrine & Caffeine Combos. The combination of Ephedrine and Caffeine makes up the core of some popular supplements that has been proven to burn fat and while retaining lean muscle mass. The supplements below represent many variations of this popular combo or their herbal equivalents (Ephedra / Ma Huang and Guarana). Xenadrine is a popular brand in this category.

4.Synephrine Combos (Herbal form: Citrus Aurantium or Bitter Orange): these are thought to be easier on the central nervous system than supplements that contain ephedrine or its herbal equivalents. Synephrine is still a stimulant but is a milder alternative to ephedrine.

5. Thyroid Boosters: designed to preserve or increase thyroid output and preserve or increase the metabolic rate to promote fat loss stimulant free. Excellent alternatives to supplements containing stimulants.

6. Insulin Mimickers are said to aid or act similar to insulin in order to help avoid large amounts of natural insulin from being secreted in the body - which would result in excess carbohydrates being stored as fat! My long distance running friends take Chromium Picolinate, from Michael Coglan's book.

7. Carnitine and Actetyl-L-Carnitine

Obviously, I have preached Carnitine (and Actetyl-L-Carnitine) in the past, as it has very low risk. But you know the expression: The greater the risk, the greater the reward. Ask yourself if it’s really worth it. Pick & choose your supplements carefully

Saturday, March 22, 2003

Joseph Coors, R.I.P.

Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner pours a libation to honor the late Joseph Coors, president and CEO of the Coors Brewing Company. The way Feulner tells it, Coors was largely responsible for ending the Cold War.

Jake replies:
Hm, Coors seemed very cutting edge with regards to missle defense, but will he hop on the "Viagra Booze" bandwagon??

Friday, March 21, 2003

Some articles on the "direct-action" idiots

"About 20 young people calling themselves Pukers4Peace emptied the plaza in front of the Federal Building with a street performance--of induced vomiting. . . . The group splattered its message between 7 and 10 a.m., but pools of vomit still covered much of the plaza at mid-afternoon. . . . 'My puddle is the longest-lasting one,' proudly declared Lauren Errea, a UC- Berkeley student."
Like sand in the gears: Fast-moving demonstrators shut down S.F., frustrate cops

Charming.

"'We had a beautiful and very successful action today,' Ilyse Hogue of Direct Action yelled into a megaphone to demonstrators gathered outside the Federal Building. 'We were able to unplug the war machine for a day.'"
Racing into Iraq--Rage in S.F. streets: PROTESTS: 1,400 arrested in 16 hours

No, Ilyse, you weren't. Get a clue.

"'Sorry about the inconvenience, people, but there are people dying,' [protestor Anna Wilson] said. 'How addicted to our stuff are we that we can't stop work for one day?'"
Maybe they protest too much: SYMPATHETIC: But people say they need to get to their job

How addicted to your ego are you that you can't let innocent people go about their lives in peace?

"'We are annoyed that we can't get to work right now, but there are people who are suffering, who are not eating and who are being bombed,' [web designer Meredith Brown] said. 'This is just a minor inconvenience compared with that.'"
Ibid.

Um, yes, Meredith, but how does making innocent third parties suffer even a little bit of inconvenience do anything to help the Iraqis?

"'I'm against the war, too. But all this does is hurt people,' [financial district worker Allison] Cruz said. 'I'm not the one dropping the bombs.'"
Maybe they protest too much: UNHAPPY: Inconvenience caused by the civil disobedience is directed at the wrong people

Exactly.
A word about the self-righteous pricks blocking traffic in San Francisco

When Gulf War I began in January of 1991, I was a sophomore at the University of Toledo. I remember reading in the student newspaper about some students who, having watched the outbreak of the war on the television in the student lounge, decided they would protest the war by refusing to leave their seats. I recall being puzzled by their behavior. Just what did they think they were accomplishing? Their chosen form of protest disrupted their own lives, but had zero effect on the people who were actually running the Desert Storm campaign.

I was reminded of this incident yesterday, when mobs of anti-war protestors blocked traffic, broke windows, and generally disrupted the lives of normal people in San Francisco. How was any of this nonsense supposed to help anyone? Let's review what they accomplished:

1. They caused inconvenience to a lot of innocent people.
2. They risked the lives of innocent people by tying up police and blocking the paths of emergency vehicles.
3. They cost innocent people money by doing property damage and disrupting commerce.
4. They pissed off a lot of people who might otherwise have been sympathetic to their cause.
5. They brought dishonor to everyone else who's opposed to the war, and made it easier for the government to classify war dissenters as subversives.

Thanks, guys.

Like the actions of those UT students 12 years ago, the behavior of these hooligans will do nothing to change the minds of the people actually in charge of making war. At least the University of Toledo students confined themselves to fucking up their own lives!

Deep down, I think the little shits know they're not going to stop the war. Stopping the war isn't the point of what they're doing. The point is to create a little drama for themselves, in which they can play the heroic underdogs struggling against the powerful forces of evil. Justin Raimondo had it right when he wrote: "In nominating themselves for sainthood, the direct-actionists are acting out their personal fantasies on the political stage. In their little morality play they are the stars, moral paragons who, by the sheer power of their goodness and bravery, will shut down the war machine." And in a piece published today, he has the right solution: "They all ought to be thrown in jail, beaten within an inch of their lives, and charged to the max." [UPDATE: Looks like Justin has edited that line out of his article. :-\ ]

Okay, I don't know about the beating part.

Thursday, March 20, 2003

Saddam = Megatron?

A National Guardsman from Ohio has legally changed his name to Optimus Prime.

Monday, March 17, 2003

Hypnosis Research Info

As there are several people reading these who are interested in hypnosis, I thought I'd pass along a cool resource that I came across...

The Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis has an extensive
database of thousands of research papers and studies that
have been done, for more than the past 50 years.

Take a look, search for some cool stuff, and if anything looks
interesting, post it (or a link) here!


http://www.hypnosis-research.org/hypnosis/index.html
http://www.hypnosis-research.org/hypnosis/contrib_search.html

david

dx1mx2@aol.com

Monday, March 03, 2003

The Day Liberty Lost a Son: Joe Fuhrig RIP

Today I learned the sad news that friend and mentor Joe Fuhrig, 'the worlds greatest libertarian golfer' has died. Joe was a kind, well respected California libertarian having run on the Libertarian Party ticket for U.S. Senate in 1982 and for Governor in 1986. His love for liberty was evident to anyone he spoke to and he was presented the Libertarian Party of California's Sons of Liberty award in 1983 as "the candidate who was most effective in communicating libertarian principles to the voters". His latest endeavors included heading the economics department at Golden Gate University (he was the one to convince me to get into graduate school), he was a Fellow at the Independent Institute, and was actively trying to challenge younger people passionate about liberty through the Summer Seminars in Political Economy program at Holy Names College. He will be missed...
For those of you interested in Mixed Martial Arts in the East Bay area (i.e. Oakland, Berkeley, etc.) check out the folks at Modern Combatives. Alan, Lilly, and Jude really know their sh*t so check them out, they are a real class act.

Saturday, March 01, 2003

Reverse Engineering Natural Patterns

I pulled the following from http://www.gordon-glasgow.org/fibonacci.html

"A Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers beginning with 1 in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. Like I said, interesting, but so what? It's not like nature would ever do anything with it, right?

Wrong. Most everyone knows that a sunflower head is formed of two opposite sets of spirals. I had always assued that they were equal. There are lots of spirals in nature - the outsides of pine cones and pineapples, etc. Well it turns out that the sunflower has 21 spirals going one direction and 34 going the other. Consecutive numbers in a Fibonacci sequence. A pine cone? 5 and 8. A pineapple? 8 and 13. Seems like this Fibonacci sequence pops up in the darndest places! Coincidence? Maybe.

The ancient Greek builders were aware of a certain ratio of height to width in rectangles that was particularly pleasing to the eye. They used it everywhere and it came to be known as the Golden Ratio, or Golden Section. There is a geometric process for constructing a Golden Ratio, it isn't just eyeballed. The ratio between the height and width of this figure is 1:1.618.

Back to the Fibonacci sequence for a sec. For any value larger than 3, the ratio between any two consecutive numbers in the sequence is approximately 1:1.6. More coincidence? Hmmmm......."