Vegan Bodybuilding & Fitness

I hear ya Yigal!

Reality Finn? The reality is that things change when we make them change!

I'm not generally an advocate of voting but "Instant Runoff Voting" seems like a great idea that answers most of the concerns people raise about voting for people who better represent them and which could be implemented immediately: http://www.fairvote.org/irv/?page=189

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"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." - The Dalai Lama, May 2001 at "Educating Heart Summit" in Portland, OR.
http://www.a-human-right.com - http://www.aware.org

I agree that things change when we make them change, but ignoring the current reality can make our current reality worse and make our dreams further away. Idealism needs common sense to be effective.

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" - Jimi Hendrix

Any other voting system would be terrible since americans are too lazy to even vote every 2-4yrs...plus voting on everything as a society would never allow anything to get done

I hope this is meant as a joke. The reality is that America's citizens in generality are either apathetic about the issues or they are confused as to what the issues are. The obvious worth in a system that actually represents the people would be to remove some of the apathy and to bring the issues into the home of the citizenry.



Again I hope this is meant as a joke. The truth is that systems that involve the entire citizenry have already been developed and simply need to be implemented. Having the entire citizenry involved in some form of decision making in the government i.e. the nation would make people much more inclined to a feeling that they can change the world.

Do I vote Democratic? I have been part of the Green Part since I was 18. I have always voted for a Democratic president. Have I voted for Republicans, in certain circumstances where it was evident the Democratic candidate was corrupt and the Republican candidate did not scare me I have voted Republican for positions in the CA (my state of residence) State Government.

I insist on quoting Lord Acton,

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"

I can't believe in a 2 party system as anything but a joke of a government for the people. Too much power in too few interests and too few people. I vote but I am not spending any time worrying about the dirty business of one party or another.

However in terms of deciding whether it is time or not to flee the country I grant that you have a point. If the Republicans gain much more of the power it may be time to move, but wait where is a person supposed to go?

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The whole of it is you. If one feels the pain of who one is and the joy then the whole of life is revealed.
arctan(1)=sum((-1)^(i+1)/(2i-1),i,1,infinity)=1-1/3+1/5-...
4*artan(1)=pi
I love vegan pie (and I am a vegan nerd).

If I knew, I'd be there already.

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" - Jimi Hendrix

If there was a place to go we'd just be leaving a problem to brew for even worse. You'd probably go somewhere republicans hate so then you'd be in more danger. I say stick here and change everything...it's kinda the case if we created a vegan nation for all vegans to move too...if the happened no vegans would be around to make non vegans vegan

Mitt Romney is the devil, people. Just so you know.

Oh, and since he's a republican who's extremely opposed to gay marriage, he is clearly, obviously, positively...gay (remember: homophobia is not the fear of homosexuals, it is the fear that one might be a homosexual - at least in my thinking it is).

Anyway, he's the devil, and I don't think he has any hope of succeeding in his personal crusade to get a gay marriage ban on the 2008 ballot for Mass. He's an outsider who used Mass to prime himself for a presidential run, and pissed off a lot of people on the way. And many people in Mass would rather see Mitt go down in flames (no pun intended) then get his way on ANYTHING - even if they don't agree with it (gay marriage). And Mass politics is all about favors, revenge, and nepotism. Of course, I'd love for it (gay marriage ban) to get on the ballot and lose, but sadly, I'm not sure it would. It'd be close, for sure, but I'd rather not take that chance -- and besides, it's a constitutional interpretation issue, and has already been decided (ehem, look away, move on).

And while I'm on the topic - Mass is the only state where gay marriage is "legal", and since the court allowed fairness and their common sense to overcome any of the bigotry and discrimination of days gone by... the state did not implode upon itself, children did not spontaneously combust, and God himself did not strike us all down with bolts of lightning. In other words, it has made no bloody difference in the lives of anyone except those people who were finally given the right to make their union official, and those who were overjoyed to see it happen. So all it did was create a little more joy around here.
Here's hoping it has a chance to create some joy in your state sometime soon!

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" - Jimi Hendrix

I was really suprised how well the gay marriage vote went in Virginia...something like 42% was for it...I was expecting much less than that

We don't celebrate the religious aspect of x-mas, but that doesn't mean we don't celebrate... we started with an early AM dog walk, then had a breakfast of "sausage" and syrup, with stuffed oatmeal (walnuts, cranberries, and other stuff).
Then we opened presents.
Then we "thanked" each other for the presents .

We just returned from a rather insane hike w/ the doggies on the mt bike trails down the street.
Kristy is now making dinner, including a loaf of bread in her new breadmaker, and a tofurky (as you may know, she's the queen of tofurky).
The dogs are now sacked, and I'll be building a fire in a bit.
We'll be watching silly funny movies and eating and drinking until a content fog sets in.

Ahhhhh....

And no animals had to suffer for our pleasure.

Hope everyone's day is as great as ours!

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" - Jimi Hendrix

I started reading "Letter to a Christian Nation" in Borders the other day and ended up just buying it. Hard to pay $16 for such a short book, but what the heck. It did dawn on me that Sam Harris is probably a fairly wealthy guy at this point, and his publishers can't hate the $$ he's bringing in, even if they hate the content of his book. Anyway, I'm not in enough yet to give any opinions about it.

I also got to reading about dark matter - the theory that there is some kind of matter which makes up much of the universe, but that can't yet be seen. The theory is yet to be disproven and has been backed up in several different studies. One study looked at galaxies and noticed that the stars on the outside of galaxies move around the center point of the galaxy a lot faster than they should. So they theorized that the space between the stars can not just be empty space - it has to contain something that is helping to propel those stars. I think it's jello But they theorized that it's "dark matter". Looking at galaxies 7 billion light years away - which is about half as far as they think the universe stretches - helped them to prove the theory.

So what does this all have to do with anything? Well it just got me thinking how HUGE the universe is and how earth is just a miniscule speck in the universe, and how I'm just a miniscule speck on that miniscule speck. And that even if I did become the greatest person ever on the history of this planet, I'd still just be a speck of a speck. And I think back to End of Faith, and to the analogy that Harris makes about the founders of religion, and how they would have thought the wheelbarrow was the greatest engineering feat in history, and yet their thoughts on spirituality are still used as the foundation for so many people's lives today (even though most live them incredibly hypocritically). It just makes me feel so inconsequential, so tiny, that it's almost nauseating.

I have a thirst in my life to find truth. It's like truth is waiting at the end of a long maze. And through unbiased and unfettered (socially speaking) thinking, we get closer and closer to the truth. But what if we get to the end of the maze and find out that the truth is completely unfulfilling in that it tells us nothing about how to live our lives other than that it doesn't matter, and that we make no difference - and that even if we did make a difference - it wouldn't matter. And I suspect that is where my quest for truth is heading, so why not just assume I'm there?

What would I then do? Would I rather believe the lie that I do matter, that we matter? Or is the point that I matter to me? That what's important to me is not by chance, but has seeped up from the mud of my genes because I was able to abandon any bias and presuppositions, because I have torn down and carefully considered every brick in rebuilding my house of truth. Is it enough to know who I am, and why I do what I do? Is everything else just distracting clutter? Are there more bricks that I need to tear down and replace (thinking of my job now) so that I am closer to "living true"? I guess maybe the truth - that I don't matter - is indeed fulfilling! In fact, I can't think of anything more important than the fact that I don't matter

This all kind of came to me this morning after I heard back that I didn't get a job I was hoping to get. I think I would've liked it, but in the end I didn't have enough specific experience. But I had ideas on how the job would have evolved and it's quite possible, perhaps even likely, that it wouldn't have worked out the way I wanted it to anyway, so that's ok. But it did get me thinking how not aligned my current job is to who I am. It's closer than my former job managing a call center for an insurance company, but in the day-to-day, it's ultimately unfulfilling and uninteresting to me. But it's pushing me in a direction that I hope I'll get to sooner than later, but that I know I'll probably get to at just the right time.

So now I think I'll make a list of what matters to me and why, and how it helps to define me. Maybe that'll be my next blog.

Anyway, thanks for reading. And remember: you don't matter.

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" - Jimi Hendrix

That's another one of the amazing things about vegans. The majority are agnostics or atheists, many realize that we are insignificant specks and so are the animals we work so hard to protect, yet we still do the "right thing". At least the things that we can logically conclude are best for everyone involved. All this without fear of some higher power punishing us if we aren't doing the right thing, or some greater reward for doing it. Completely the opposite really, we do all this fully realizing that nothing matters anyway.

Go figure.

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The Pittsburgh Vegan Meetup

http://www.facebook.com/veganburgh

Had a great ride last night. I rode with a current sponsored expert racer and former sponsored expert who rode me into the ground as recent as 6 months ago. The last couple times out with him I noticed that I was hanging pretty good. Then last week I felt like I was stronger than him, but I wasn't sure. Then last night we hammered him. He's kind of a dick, so I didn't mind - we didn't leave him in the woods or anything, but he was definitely hurtin'.
I still can't touch the current expert race, but I'm getting closer, and that's a great feeling. Also, he's on a 21 lb rigid 29er and I'm on a 31 lb all-mountain full suspension, so that makes quite a difference for the smooth singletrack we were riding. My bike is better in the rocks and tech downhills, but there aren't many of those on last night's trails.
I know I have been steadily improving over the last year or so, but it's good to get a measure of that. And I've definitely improved more than anyone else I ride with, which I can only attribute to being the only vegan in the bunch.

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" - Jimi Hendrix

Awesome...maybe your doing better than you though. I train on my own most of the time and due to school I miss alot of the Sunday group rides...then we go out "easy" and I'm always going easier than a few people that are now behind me but were way infront of me. I also seem to be taking longer pulls in the front compared to nearly everyone I ride with. Oddly most of the time I feel like my training isn't that strong when this happens.

Anticipating a snowstorm that was supposed to dump 4-6 inches on the Cape last night/this morning, I decided to sneak in a ride after work, thinking the snow might prevent me from riding for a few days. I did an interval ride, which I found more difficult than usual for a few reasons - 1) it was pretty cold (about 22) and when it gets that cold it seems harder to get full breaths - so I struggled with my wind; 2) the 1-2 inches of snow already on the trails from the last snow we got stuck to my tires, making them heavier; 3) after about 90 minutes I got a flat. And I was on the hardest trail at the point furthest from where I parked. Getting a flat is no big deal, but by the time I got it changed my feet were ice cubes.
To top it all off - the storm never came lol.
One of my favorite sayings that I apply to biking is "Some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant". I was definitely the hydrant last night.

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" - Jimi Hendrix

Maybe its just a bad week for vegan cyclists...luckily and oddly I haven't gotten a flat on a road ride for a couple months...which means I'm getting one later today since I just thought about it...anyway I'll complain about that later on my blog today once I get my flat