NYT: Posture Affects Standing, and Not Just the Physical Kind

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jane Brody writes in the New York Times Sept. 6, 2016:

Poor posture can have ill effects that radiate throughout the body, causing back and neck pain, muscle fatigue, breathing limitations, arthritic joints, digestive problems and mood disturbances. It can also create a bad impression when applying for a job, starting a relationship or making new friends.

Poor posture can even leave you vulnerable to street crime. Many years ago, researchers showed that women who walked sluggishly with eyes on the ground, as if carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, were much more likely to be mugged than those who walked briskly and purposely with head erect. I can’t prove posture was at fault, but this is indeed what happened to a Brooklyn neighbor on her way home one night.

We live in a gravitational field, and when our bodies are out of line with the vertical, certain muscles will have to work harder than others to keep us upright. This can result in undue fatigue and discomfort that can outlast the strain that caused them.

In a study of 110 students at San Francisco State University, half of whom were told to walk in a slumped position and the other half to skip down a hall, the skippers had a lot more energy throughout the day.

Any repetitive or prolonged position “trains” the body’s muscles and tendons to shorten or lengthen and places stress on bones and joints that can reshape them more or less permanently. Just as walking in high heels can shorten and tighten the Achilles’ tendons and calf muscles, slouching while sitting hour after hour can result in a persistent slouch, while standing and walking while slouched can lead to permanently rounded shoulders and upper back.

Although early humans spent most of their waking hours walking, running and standing, today in developed countries, 75 percent of work is performed while sitting. Most people sit going to and from work and while relaxing after work. The longer people sit (or stand) without a change in position and movement, the more likely they will be to develop a postural backache, according to a report in The Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics.

“Text neck,” a term coined by a Florida chiropractor, Dean L. Fishman, is a repetitive stress injury resulting from hours spent with the head positioned forward and down while using electronic devices. This leads to tight muscles in the back of the neck and upper back. And those who lean forward while sitting may be inclined to clench their jaws and tighten their facial muscles, causing headache and TMJ — temporomandibular joint syndrome

Leaning forward or slouching can also reduce lung capacity by as much as 30 percent, reducing the amount of oxygen that reaches body tissues, including the brain, according to Dr. Rene Cailliet, a pioneer in the field of musculoskeletal medicine who died in March.

Additionally, slouching or sitting in a scrunched position compresses the abdominal organs and may reduce peristaltic action that is important to normal digestion and bowel function.

One of today’s most troublesome activities, especially for children and adolescents whose bone structure is still developing, is carrying extraordinarily heavy backpacks to and from school and often throughout the school day. The weight forces them to bend forward, with potentially the same consequences as slouching.

Alexander Technique lessons are a great way to improve your posture.

I always had terrible posture until I started taking Alexander lessons in 2008, at age 42, and within a month, my friends could see a big difference in how I looked, how I felt about myself, and how I related to others.

How you carry yourself has a profound affect on how you feel. People who move awkwardly tend to be awkward throughout their lives. A stiff neck often leads to stiff social interactions. Tight shoulders often cause tight thinking. A bad back often leads to a bad life. Distorting muscle tension leads to — and results from — distorted emotions, distorted thinking and distorted movement.

The point of Alexander Technique lessons, by contrast, is to learn to do everything we want to do more efficiently, effectively and easily. Read more.

Posted in Alexander Technique | Comments Off on NYT: Posture Affects Standing, and Not Just the Physical Kind

Frequency of the word ‘Racism’ in NYT articles, chronologically

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

crs_yiaviaao9bh

Source

Posted in Race | Comments Off on Frequency of the word ‘Racism’ in NYT articles, chronologically

L.A.’s Dirty Little Brown Secret

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

David Cole writes:

Outright racism by Latinos against blacks gets little coverage in the liberal press and no outrage from SJWs, and black “civil rights leaders” are scared shitless to confront it with the same merciless, take-no-prisoners attitude they reserve for every perceived “microaggression” from whites.

We all know this.

What I’d prefer to concentrate on is the fact that the Big Hazard story, and the (non)reaction to it from the usual suspects, slightly, just slightly, lays bare one of L.A.’s dirtiest little secrets: Most nonblack Angelenos are probably rooting for what the gang is doing (the goal if not the methods). I’m neither celebrating nor defending that notion; I’m simply presenting it as the learned observation of a guy who was born in L.A. 47 years ago, and who has always kept his primary residence right here in this city. Among L.A.’s white and Asian residents (for the purpose of this piece, Jews, Persians, and Armenians are counted as white), Mexican neighborhoods are seen as preferable to black neighborhoods.

Mexican neighborhoods, while still not the best places to go jogging at 1 a.m., are generally safer and more productive than black neighborhoods. Again, I’m not celebrating that fact. But it is a fact. As formerly all-black neighborhoods like Compton and Watts have become majority Latino, the crime rate has gone down excepting the increase in crime that comes from localized battles between black and Mexican gangs. That problem will dissipate once one group achieves its desired hegemony, and given the choice, most white Angelenos will root for the Mexicans.

There are several reasons for this. The first is a simple desire for self-preservation. Yes, members of both the black and Latino communities bring crime to the city. Burglaries, car thefts, gang activity, etc. But the black community is an exceptionally angry community. There’s a hatred there, specifically against whites, that leads to an entirely different type of crime…unreasonably, unnecessarily violent crimes targeting whites. Now, you can say what you will about black rage. Hell, call it justified if you want (I’m directing that at my leftist pals). But don’t call it fictional. It exists, and I’d rather not have it in my backyard. The black community has been growing more and more irrational each year, and less willing to get along. Damn near every slight seems to lead to a riot, and there’s seemingly nothing whites can do to mollify the rage. If you’re white and you try to help the black community, you’re a patriarchal racist. If you’re white and you don’t try to help the black community, you’re a neglectful racist. Regardless, you’re already a “privileged” racist anyway by virtue of your skin color.

On the other hand, the Mexican community here is not really all that angry at whites, owing in large part to the fact that so many California Hispanics consider themselves white. Sure, you’ll get a bunch of loud young Mexis who’ll go downtown occasionally to protest immigration laws, but Mexicans here are not race rioters like blacks. In fact, I’d argue that Mexicans are L.A.’s buffer against the kind of BLM race riots we’re seeing across the country. You know how easy it used to be to get blacks to riot in L.A.? In February 1992, a group of Holocaust revisionists (at the invitation of a black activist) met at a Masonic hall in L.A. for a “summit.” All it took was for the JDL to “leak” to a few local black leaders that “da Klan” was meeting in L.A., and in practically an instant, 300 angry blacks (and a few red-bandanna-wearing white commies) showed up, beating attendees, hurling bottles, and necessitating the arrival of a legion of foot and mounted police in riot gear to sort everything out.

Two months later, though, black Angelenos learned a harsh lesson, as their beloved “Rodney King riot” was, by day two, hijacked by Latinos who just wanted to steal stuff from the stores that blacks had smashed the previous night. What started out as a race riot was soon robbed of its ideology by apolitical, opportunistic looters. Black rioters had wanted to beat and kill whites and Asians. Mexican looters just wanted some free TVs. Given the choice, which community do you think L.A.’s whites and Asians would prefer to live next door to?

Posted in Blacks, BLM, California, Los Angeles | Comments Off on L.A.’s Dirty Little Brown Secret

The Alt-right Is Political Punk Rock

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

… Hillary’s recent speech denouncing the alt-right has raised eyebrows. It was as if in 1976 progressive-rock titans Emerson, Lake & Palmer had released a double album devoted to excoriating this new band nobody had ever heard of before called the Ramones.

If you can remember back four decades, it might strike you that the alt-right phenomenon of 2016 is basically political punk rock: loud, abrasive, hostile, white, back to basics, and fun.

Johnny Ramone was not as talented a musician as Keith Emerson, but a decade after Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s he had some timely ideas about how rock should get on track again. …

But it didn’t seem that way to many at the time. The punk rockers struck most nice people then as barbaric.

Which they sort of were. That was the point of picking up an electric guitar: to make a lot of noise.

Even the most deplorable habit of a few on the alt-right—the use of Nazi imagery—has its punk predecessors. The Ramones’ greatest song was “Blitzkrieg Bop.”

crzj3fgxyaa1zwk

crzj3fgwgaehxfk

crzj3fiwiaa1x5h

crzj3fiweaea_6m

COMMENTS:

* Don’t forget the original first lines to “Today your love tomorrow the world” were “I’m a nazi baby a nazi yes I am”

* The Clash had White Riot. I think they were pretty explicit about being a white identify movement.

* Along those lines, some snips from a 2006 NYT article about the post-punk American hardcore scene:

How Hard Was Their Core? Looking Back at Anger

A new documentary, “American Hardcore,” tells the story of Minor Threat and like-minded bands. And it begins with hardcore veterans talking about the guy Mr. MacKaye wouldn’t sing about. Vic Bondi, from Chicago’s Articles of Faith, talks about the genre as a reaction to Ronald Reagan’s “white man order.”

The film also hints at an underlying anxiety about race. As one former hardcore kid puts it, the genre was one of the few that “felt like it wasn’t totally ripping off black culture,” which might be another way of saying it felt white.

Mr. MacKaye mentions another out-of-step experience — his years as a white kid in a majority-black school — by way of explaining his song “Guilty of Being White.” It’s an anti-racist song, he says, meaning anti-anti-white: “You blame me for slavery/A hundred years before I was born.”

Black Flag had a similar song, “White Minority,” which promised, “Gonna be a white minority.” (It was sung by a Latino singer, Ron Reyes, emphasizing the sarcasm.) Hardcore is, among other things, the sound of whiteness under siege, and in an odd way it’s a joyful noise. In the early 80’s, thanks in part to these bands, even white suburban kids could feel like righteous underdogs.

All those [desecrated] Reagan heads on flyers seem pretty spiteful, but maybe there’s also a hint of envy: tough young white guys paying grudging tribute to a tough old one.

* If Trump wrote the first Ramones album…..

1. Blitzkrieg Bop (No change. You don’t mess with the classics.)
2. Beat on the Blacks
3. Hillary is a Hag
4. I Wanna Be Your God-Emperor
5. Chain Saw (one of the tools I’ll use to build The Wall)
6. Now I Wanna Make America Great Again
7. I Don’t Wanna Start a Land War with Russia
8. Loudmouth (No change, just a dedication to Megyn Kelly, Lyin’ Hillary and that fat-disgusting-pig Rosie O’Donnell in the liner notes.)
9. Havana Affair w/ an Eastern-European Super Model
10. Listen to My 10-Point Plan on Immigration Reform
11. (I own all the property on) 53rd & 3rd
12. Let’s (not) Dance (around the issue of abolishing birthright citizenship)
13. I Don’t Wanna Fight a War for Jews
14. Today The Wall, Tomorrow The World

* I would have considered myself alt-right six or nine months ago, but I’m distancing myself from the label now. Milo, Steve and other sympathetic journalists say that the Nazi stuff is mostly “trolling” for shock value, but I’m starting to doubt that. If you’ve spend any significant amount of time on sites like TRS you know that plenty of the posters there are dead serious about it. Check out the comments under that article by the Jewish guy claiming he was alt-right. The most popular alt-right podcast is Fash the Nation, which recently featured this song. Are they trolling or serious? At a certain point, what difference does it make?

Hello Merchant you old fiend
We have grown tired of your greed
In the darkness always creeping
Looting our nations while we’re sleeping
And though the cattle-cars lie empty on the line
We’ll bide our time
Heating the Ovens of Auschwitz

In restless dreams I walked alone
Munich streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I raised my right arm and began Mein Kampf
Then our backs were stabbed by the flames of the Reichstag fire
A funeral pyre
That lit the Ovens of Auschwitz

And in the fire’s light I saw
Six Million Hebrews, maybe more
Lying even when not speaking
Poisoning young minds with false teachings
Commies telling us that we all had to share
Yet no one dared
To send the trains to Auschwitz

“Fools,” said I, “You do not know”
Jewry like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Raise right arms and I might reach you
But the Allied bombs like heavy raindrops fell…
And cooled the Ovens of Auschwitz

And the people bowed and prayed
To the Volcano God enslaved
But one man left us his warning
And in our hearts still lives his yearning
And the man said “The lies of the Rabbi’s can only be stopped by

force
And gas of course (of coursh)
And in the Ovens of Auschwitz”

* It was a lot harder to accuse someone of being a Nazi in the 1970′s because many of my generation had fathers, uncles, or family friends who fought against them. The memory was much more fresh and no one (((ethnic))) group claimed it as their unique experience. In fact, one was constantly reminded that is was Americans (now we would call them whites) who saved the Jews from the ovens. Collecting militaria was not nearly as stigmatized especially if someone you knew brought it back as war booty. reading books on WW2, military board games, soldiers occupying Germany were something that could be reflected upon by living memory (for instance now you could not read a new book on ww2 where anyone other than the most junior officer or enlisted man could be interviewed because every higher up is long since dead).The fact that the US and the USSR won the war meant that there was a more casual attitude towards their vanquished foe. Nazism was not something to be feared. In fact, everything that diminished our enemy diminished our efforts. So something like the Ramone’s video is more of a joke than it is a glorification of the Nazis in it because everyone in it were all long dead. We killed them.

* See Lester Bangs’s “White Noise Supremacists”

I’d point out that turn of the century indie rock was also very much an implicit white identity movement. It was arty white suburban guys moving to the city and creating a kind of cool that had nothing to do with hip-hop.

* White Riot – a response to blacks rioting at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, and the Clash getting mugged by a black gang. “They can do it, why can’t we?”

White Man In Hammersmith Palais – Joe Strummer goes to a reggae concert and feels alienated and out of place. All his assumptions about ‘the black struggle’ are proven naive and wrong.

Safe European Home – Strummer gets back home from a holiday in Jamaica and says, “Thank God I don’t live there”. Another song about disillusionment with black culture.

Fun fact – I knew Strummer towards the end of his life, and he told me he voted Ukip in the 1999 European elections.

Posted in Alt Right, Nazi | Comments Off on The Alt-right Is Political Punk Rock

There are about as many female talking heads on TV news as men and yet if all their opinions disappeared from TV, the world would not notice or suffer

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

My friend is having some crazy thoughts. He says that if no woman ever expressed an opinion on politics, the field of Political Science would be undiminished. Ditto economics, law, classical music, architecture, physics, chemistry, math, biology.

Women giving up punditry would be like men giving up knitting.

On the other hand, if every male pundit disappeared, the world would not be diminished.

If no woman had ever taken part in politics in the West, women would be happier today, men would be happier today, and the West would be stronger and not overrun with unsuitable immigrants.

Crazy thinking. And bad. Very wrong.

Posted in Feminism | Comments Off on There are about as many female talking heads on TV news as men and yet if all their opinions disappeared from TV, the world would not notice or suffer