assassin_696

Definitely, except for the final few minutes when Ivory Coast suddenly made a few moves.

here's an article on the basics of westside training: http://www.tmuscle.com/free_online_article/sports_body_training_performance/the_periodization_bible_part_ii;jsessionid=5BA9204D51D0377CCEB933625E2F2054-hf.hydra Similarly I follow methods such as max effort and dynamic effort (explained in the article) while also throwing in volume. The best way to find what works for yourself is to try several programs and see what works for you. I don't really want to throw my routine out there since it's tailored from experience from arnold's push/pull split, ronnie coleman's split and other splits in the past. I currently modified it mainly for hypertrophy since running long distances+strength training isn't working out too well for me since I'm leaving for the Marines soon. Thanks, it's an interesting article, not sure if I'd have the consistency to make it work but I'm pretty tempted to give it a go.

Anybody seen any exciting games yet? The three/four I've watched have all been fairly uninspiring, except the South Africa/Mexico one which was quite good.

I think the noughties will probably be remembered more for how music was distributed instead of any particular musical movement. The rise of easy online distribution (legal or illegal) allowing anyone to have a go, versus the mass marketed Idol type formats with their strategic Christmas number 1's. I think it feels like there's been an immense variety of music on offer in the last decade, and your perspective probably depends on what you're into. For me I'll remember it for the emergence of bands like Arcade Fire, the Arctic Monkeys, The White Stripes, artists like Jay-Z and Kanye and the continued reign of Radiohead to name a few. The last few years has seen a nice folk/Americana style revival too with Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes.

Paw_Claw, I appreciate what you're saying, it just seems completely counter intuitive to me that you want a muscular body but would rather get it incredibly slowly through lots of light exercises. You could bench heavy for a good few weeks and still not even notice too much of a difference,

Lol, air horns.

Yeah I'd be quite interested to learn a bit about your hybrid style if that's cool.

No he's actually right, a muscle either grows or it shrinks. When most people talk about toning they really just mean cutting the fat around the muscle so it appears more defined. A muscle doesn't hold "a tighter shape" by doing pressups, and if you can permanently contract your muscles like that I'd be worried about your physiology. And trust us when we say doing the bench press a few times a week won't give you a "muscle stud" body, that takes years of hard training, good genetics and a shedload of protein. Man up and get to a gym if you want muscle quickly. Rowing machines are great though, if you want to improve your stamina do long (2x20 or 2x30 minute) pieces on them at about 60% of your maximum heart rate. Make sure you're using the right technique though, rowing is a leg drive movement, don't heave through with the arms like 90% of people do in gyms. Visit the concept 2 website if you want more details on rowing technique and training ideas with a rowing machine.

I'd imagine you want to mix up (hard) bodyweight exercises, lots of pullups, Planche pushups, handstand pressups and core with heavy lifts like squats, deadlifts etc and explosive olympic lifts like myweponsg00d said. You need functional strength so forget bicep curls or lateral raises or any of that, work on motions that either simulate parkour actions (pullups, box jumps) or build absolute and/or explosive strength (squats, deadlifts etc.)

NICE deadlift, what's your current squat? I'd be curious to know what your routine looks like if you don't mind too. I guess at your level you're way beyond linear progression and it involves some kind of cyclic progressions? I followed a fairly standard 5x5 linear progression system (Bill Starr) last year, it worked great and I got a lot stronger but when I got to uni in October I got into rowing and hours of UT2's every week don't exactly go hand in hand with mass gain. Hopefully I'll get back into it again a bit this summer, I've definitely missed that feeling you get after a good heavy deadlift.

I don't know about other people's opinions on this, but I'd probably think that a smith machine squat is still better than a dumbbell squat, as much as I hate smith machines. Not so for bench press or shoulder press (dumbbells are great), but you just can't get the mass over your centre of gravity for a squat with dumbbells like you can with a bar, or get the weight as high.

But the fact is when a ship is boarded illegally at high seas the ship has a right to defend themselves with proportionate force. I agree the activist's "defence" does seem a little brutal, but I'm not sure how I'd react if the ship I was on was boarded in the dead of night by armed Israeli commandos dropping from a helicopter. That doesn't exactly scream "we come in peace" to me. And the fact that lethal force was used as self-defence by trained military against non-lethal activists who were in turn acting in self-defence makes me say that the Israeli's handled this a lot worse.

By go freely, do you mean another 28 or so miles before Israel could legally board and search the ship? Since they'd still be miles away from anything, I'm going to go with not very dangerous at all.

You tend not to have too many problems when you use tear gas, tasers and rubber bullets against humanitarian activists. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/01/gaza-flotilla-eyewitness-accounts-gunfire http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Israel/asalta/legalidad/internacional/elpepuopi/20100601elpepiint_1/Tes And unfortunately anti-semitism still doesn't justify breaking the law.

How are we supposed to know what motivates you? You're not morbidly obese so we can't tell you you're going to die to motivate you, it sounds like you need mild motivation to just generally eat a bit cleaner, which is something you have to work out for yourself. We can give you fairly standard weight-loss advice, cut down on refined sugars and saturated fats, exercise more etc. but when it comes to motivation everyone's different. Some people do it because they think that a better physique will be more impressive to others (girls) and some do it because they enjoy the process and like feeling healthy. And yes, you can eat chicken strips in moderation and still lose weight.

Reading more and more into this I'll admit the legal issues around this are a lot more complex than I first thought (as ever), but the analysis which makes the most sense is that Israel still acted illegally. I can go into details if necessary.

Legally The boat was 40 miles offshore, so was nowhere near the contiguous zone. You can still apprehend boats in International Waters if you have good reason to suspect them of terrorist activity, piracy, human trafficking or the slave trade etc. but Israel actually signed a UN act last year which revokes this privilege and gives the flag state (in this case Turkey) sole responsibility for apprehending these ships in International Waters. Reading into it a little more, it's technically not an act of piracy because the Israeli ships had a military commission from the Israeli government, so it would be an act of illegal warfare if the ships were acting on the behalf of the Israeli government and would effectively be Israeli commandos killing Turkish activists on Turkish territory (you see why Turkey is pissed). But if the commandos didn't have the government's authority then they could be prosecuted for murder by Turkey.

No it doesn't, please don't think that. Furthermore, if the crew of the Marmara believed that force was being used against them without legal justification (and in this case force could be defined as armed soldiers descending via helicopter) then legally they're entitled to defend themselves. What do you base that on? The Convention of the Law of the Sea, and basic laws of self defence (i.e. defending yourself against a burglar with proportionate force, note the burglar doesn't always have to attack you for you to have the right to physically defend your property) From what I understand, a spokesman for the Israeli PM invoked the San Remo Memorandum: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2914517.htm Unfortunately he's wrong, the San Remo Memo only applies to states under the laws of war, and Israel isn't such. The concept of blockade only applies to war situations. The clue's in the title: The San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea. There are some legal nuances that they throw up with these things, but the Convention of the Law of the Sea trumps them and this memo doesn't apply. The Convention on the Law of the Sea does stipulate that a coastal state may consider intervention if a ship is engaged in arms and drug smuggling, the slave trade or terrorist activities. But Israel could not justify that because the ships set sail after passing through customs checks in Turkey.

No it doesn't, please don't think that. Furthermore, if the crew of the Marmara believed that force was being used against them without legal justification (and in this case force could be defined as armed soldiers descending via helicopter) then legally they're entitled to defend themselves.

They're invoking the right to engage in military action in self defence?? If they are that's beyond clutching at straws, but whatever. The Marmara not accepting the Israeli's requests to turn round still doesn't put doubt to the illegality of Israel's actions, the intentions of the Marmara are irrelevant, except in the very special circumstances when there was a clear and present danger to life in Gaza by the Marmara reaching the blockade (Israel could never justify that in a million years) and so the Marmara is still protected by the Laws of the Sea.

Okay, I don't really want to be dragged back into this, but questioned by whom and on what legal basis? Because if they're invoking the San Remo Manual then that only applies to two states at war, Israel may have declared itself at war with Hamas but Hamas isn't a state and the ship was flying the flag of Turkey (and the other ships were flying different flags). Besides ships expressly for the purpose of delivering humanitarian aid are still exempt from the memorandum, and it only really applies to warships charging a blockade. In fact, they breached a UN act that they actually signed in 2009 that says the jurisdiction for any offences potentially committed by a ship lies with the state of the flag the ship is flying. Um, no, that would effectively be a war crime. A plane is different because it poses a more obvious clear and present danger and there aren't many ways of stopping one other than shooting it down. Stopping a slow moving ship is an entirely different matter, especially when the ship had been checked in Turkey under the Customs Act and was known to be delivering humanitarian aid.

Okay romy, I think we're going to have to agree to differ on this. We seem to be largely arguing about semantics now and I don't think I'm going to change your mind on what Israel is "obligated" to do.

Minor point, the ships were 40 miles out to sea, the sun's rising in that region at about 5-6am at the moment (I think), ships that size don't travel at 40 miles an hour, probably not even 20. They could have waited a couple of hours. Or even better, until they had the legal authority.

Really? Because rubber bullets and electric shocks are fairly standard crowd control techniques and I can see why they'd use them early on as a way to stem any resistance straight away. I'm not saying the Israeli's descended the ropes guns blazing Rambo-style shooting at children, I'm saying they boarded the ships in a hostile way used non-lethal but maiming weapons to control the activists without direct provocation and then treated the activists (who as you said, put up little resistance on the other ships) in such a way that violated their human rights. But anyway, your logic and my logic are both fairly irrelevant because we weren't on that ship and neither of us have a working knowledge of IDF naval boarding procedures. What might not seem logical to you (firing rubber bullets before being attacked) might be standard procedure to them, and I can see why it might be so. Of course there's an issue of source credibility, but are your sources IDF? And can you cite the sources? I'm interested in reading the wording from their end, they might well claim there was no resistance but that may have been because they brutally prevented it. Yes, but you're wrong. Israel knew the ship's intentions, where they were heading, what they were carrying and who was on them. They didn't have an explicit ship's manifest but they were searched in port by a NATO member. This was a publicised event that's happened in the past (with no arms smuggling), Israel even let them through five times before the war last year but subsequently they've always been redirected to a different port. So actually Israel had a pretty good idea what was going on, this wasn't some big black box that was floating towards Gaza and no one had a clue what was on it. You need to stop using the word obligatory because it can mean binding in law or conscience, when this clearly wasn't the case. You've admitted yourself that it would have been better to search the ships in port, that means there was another course of action, hence the action was not obligatory.

You can't compare simple ships going by on international waters close to Israel, to ships that actually ignored Israel's requests NOT to enter Israel's territorial waters, and that were going straight to Gaza, no doubt. I agree the ships' intentions were pretty clear from a layman's point of view but legally there isn't really a distinction between the two, the ships had freedom of navigation under the Law of the Seas so the most the Israeli's could do was wait until they entered sovereign waters. Anyway I'm not going to belabour the point, the law's pretty clear about this and I think you're acknowledging that so it's a difference of opinion elsewhere. And was and is widely questioned as for which unit should've been sent. But either way, the rest of the ships posed no resistance, and none were attacked. That's being disputed: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/01/gaza-flotilla-eyewitness-accounts-gunfire And poorly translated from a Spanish newspaper: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Israel/asalta/legalidad/internacional/elpepuopi/20100601elpepiint_1/Tes I feel like a broken record. Israell cannot afford security breaches. A search was obligatory, and inevitable. You're not the only one. I'm not denying their right to search the ship in port or their own territorial waters. But there's absolutely no reason from a security standpoint of stopping a ship well before a blockade unless the Israeli's had good evidence that the ship was going to try and run the blockade and detonate some kind of WMD in port. The fact that these were slow-moving ships from a known activist group carrying members of parliament, Nobel peace laureates, doctors etc. means that Israel can't justify it that way. Even if they strongly suspected the ships of carrying a weapons cache (which would be an astonishingly stupid idea for ships trying to raise awareness through a stunt like this) they could still only search the ship in their waters and then take the necessary action if the ships were smuggling arms (which they weren't). So bottom line is the search was not obligatory. A ship arriving in port with a load of weapons which are found and confiscated is not a breach, and would be much more useful from the Israeli's point of view than finding them in international waters (where they were found illegally).