THE SECRET RACE

The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

by Daniel Coyle (Author), Tyler Hamilton (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 5,989 ratings

 Coming from a background of being involved in cycling in the 90's I was well aware of the drug use in pro cycling. I've read most of the popular books about Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the culture of doping. This is my favourite one - Tyler Hamilton really lays it all out, and it's an entertaining read.

On a fateful night in 2009, Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle met for dinner in Boulder, Colorado. Over the next eighteen months, Hamilton would tell Coyle his story, and his sport's story, in explosive detail, never sparing himself in the process. In a way, he became as obsessed with telling the truth as he had been with winning the Tour de France just a few years before. The truth would set Tyler free, but would also be the most damning indictment yet of teammates like Lance Armstrong.

The result of this determination is The Secret Race, a book that pulls back the curtain and takes us into the secret world of professional cycling like never before. A world populated by unbelievably driven – and some flawed – characters. A world where the competition used every means to get an edge, and the options were stark. A world where it often felt like there was no choice.
 

NUTRITION AND PHYSICAL DEGENERATION

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939)

by Weston A. Price (Author), 

4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 1,133 ratings

 

If I had to pick just one nutrition, diet, and health book, it would be this one.

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-Physical-Degeneration-Weston-Price

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An epic study demonstrating the importance of whole food nutrition, and the degeneration and destruction that comes from a diet of processed foods.

For nearly 10 years, Weston Price and his wife traveled around the world in search of the secret to health. Instead of looking at people afflicted with disease symptoms, this highly-respected dentist and dental researcher chose to focus on healthy individuals, and challenged himself to understand how they achieved such amazing health. 

Dr. Price traveled to hundreds of cities in a total of 14 different countries in his search to find healthy people. He investigated some of the most remote areas in the world. He observed perfect dental arches, minimal tooth decay, high immunity to tuberculosis and overall excellent health in those groups of people who ate their indigenous foods. 

He found when these people were introduced to modernized foods, such as white flour, white sugar, refined vegetable oils and canned goods, signs of degeneration quickly became quite evident. Dental caries, deformed jaw structures, crooked teeth, arthritis and a low immunity to tuberculosis became rampant amongst them. Dr. Price documented this ancestral wisdom including hundreds of photos in his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is available to read free online

Thanks to Gutenberg.net.au for sharing it

ALTERED CARBON

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan (2008) 

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 14,201 ratings

 

  All science fiction tends to be tainted by suspicions of being programming, and this is certainly no exception. But despite being a story about AI later made into a series by Netflix, I still think it's great. Up there with the best sci-fi classics and certainly my pick of Richard Morgan's books.

 

 This must-read story is a confident, action-and-violence packed thriller, and future classic noir SF novel from a multi-award-winning author.

Four hundred years from now mankind is strung out across a region of interstellar space inherited from an ancient civilization discovered on Mars. The colonies are linked together by the occasional sublight colony ship voyages and hyperspatial data-casting. Human consciousness is digitally freighted between the stars and downloaded into bodies as a matter of course.

But some things never change. So when ex-envoy, now-convict Takeshi Kovacs has his consciousness and skills downloaded into the body of a nicotine-addicted ex-thug and presented with a catch-22 offer, he really shouldn't be surprised. 

 

Contracted by a billionaire to discover who murdered his last body, Kovacs is drawn into a terrifying conspiracy that stretches across known space and to the very top of society.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Altered-Carbon

40 MILLION FREE EBOOKS

Anne's Archive is an amazing resource with over 40 million free ebooks online. It is described as the largest truly open library in human history. All their code and data are completely open source, and the way the site is set up pretty much side steps all issues of copyright (they are only sharing download links rather than the books themselves).

It currently has 42,424,101 books and 98,536,735 papers in it's database, all available to download, and these numbers are rapidly growing. It includes a lot of conspiracy books, some of which are heavily censored and hard to find elsewhere.

I have been asked how it all works, so here are some basic instructions showing how to download eBooks:

First go to the Anna's Archive website and enter the author or title you are looking for in the search box - https://annas-archive.org/

The results of your search will rapidly appear, & if you want to filter by format, tick the formats you are after, (for example, I like PDF or EPUB) in the file types on the left

After you select the book you want, click on one of the two "slow download" options - If you are new to the site you won't be a paid subscriber, but these will still both work fine. Don't get carried away, you can only do one download at a time from each of the options.

 

There are daily limits on how many books you can download, I'm not sure what they are, possibly 10?. If you do too many downloads the site stops working. Leave it a a day and try again. Anne's Archive is certainly not the only site to find eBooks, just the easiest on to use. This website describes a bunch of other ebook download alternative sites

Next, remember to hit the "Download now" link to start the book downloading

Save your eBooks in a folder (don't change or rename this folder once you start using them on your eBook reader or your books will disappear from the reader & you will have to add them again) - I edit the names of the new books before adding them to my eBook reader because the file names of eBooks downloaded through Anne's Archive tend to be very long.

On my Windows PC I use Calibre eBook reader which can be downloaded here

I was trying to keep things simple for people new to eBooks and tested some other more basic eBook readers such as Ice Cream reader, but I prefer having all the features of Calibre (which is free anyway) - it's slightly more complex at first but it does everything I want.

For reading books on an Android tablet or phone I use the Read Era app which is really good. It's not set up for all the more complex text editing stuff that Calibre can do, but is great for displaying and reading your eBook collections. Although its not designed for PC use, it apparently can be installed on a windows PC - I'm about to try doing that and instructions for installing it on a Widows PC are here

 

Having access to 42 million eBooks is pretty amazing, and before you know it, you can have your own vast library.

BREATH

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020)  

by James Nestor (Author)

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 29,739 ratings

 

 

If this book could be summarized into into a brief overview it might be to make sure you breathe through your nose and avoid all mouth breathing. And that when it comes to breathing, less is more. That sounds very simple but the range of effects that good breathing technique has is remarkable. And the book itself is surprisingly engrossing.

 

A New York Times Bestseller

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020

Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR
 
“A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love

No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly.

There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.

Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.

Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

 https://www.amazon.com/Breath-New-Science-Lost-Art

 

WEIRD SCENES

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippy Dream Paperback (2014)

by David McGowan (Author), Nick Bryant (Foreword)

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 1,708 ratings

 

Laurel Canyon is a real rabbit hole - the interconnections here are vast. It's a bit of mind bender for anyone finding out for the first time that all the popular 60's bands were deep state social programming. And it doesn't stop there...

 

 

The very strange but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia. Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. 

 

Members of bands like the Byrds, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, CSN, Three Dog Night and Love, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor and Carole King, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills. 

 

But there was a dark side to that scene as well. Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would like to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. 

 

Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians and intelligence personnel - the same sort of people who gave birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all the canyon's colorful characters - rock stars, hippies, murderers and politicos - happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Weird-Scenes-Inside-Canyon

Feel like checking out some Laurel Canyon mind programming? This video is a classic, Love, "7 And 7 Is" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtFM-a5Xf1M