Mindconnection eNL, 2012-04-01

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In this issue:
Good News | Product Highlight | Brainpower | Finances | Security | Health/Fitness | Factoid | Thought 4 the Day

Take Intel, for example. In early 2011, Intel announced it was going to hire 1,000 software engineers. Since then, Intel hired 1,000 and then some. Of course, many of these people had previously lost jobs due to the job destruction program. But still, that's a significant amount of hiring by a single company. And now Intel is repeating this in debt-torn Europe. Source: IEEE Career Alert

Take General Electric, for another example. The company recently committed to hiring 5,000 veterans over the next five years. Source: Maintenance Technology.

If you consider job gains good news, how can you help make more such good news happen? Very simple:

1. Go to www.ntu.org.
2. Pay the pittance of a membership fee.
3. When the annual Congressional rating report arrives, look at who spends (steals) the most. That would be anyone with a C grade or worse.
4. Take some kind of action. Pick a big spender and blog about the destruction this criminal is inflicting. Draw from the data, and use good logic so you can show this person's misconduct is, in the legal sense, criminal (see the 10th Amendment) and costs American jobs (every govt job, on average, destroys 50 private sector jobs due mainly to the overhead effect). Work to get the incumbent out of office. This does not have to be your own senator or misrepresentative for you to take action against this person and his/her crimes.

And don't forget that Spendbama was an F-rated senator prior to becoming our Job Eliminator In Chief. As the nation was reeling from Bush's overspending (economic insanity), informed people would have seen Obama as the worst choice to follow him. And that is how it has turned out. Let's not make that mistake twice.

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/td>

A major contributor to this zombie state of existence is the technology-induced coma.

The zombie problem originally was the domain of the television. Many people have heard me say I have a washing machine for my clothes and a dishwasher for my dishes. I don't think I also need a machine for washing my brain, so I don't do television (thus, I have a dirty mind!). But this witty refrain understates the problem. Television doesn't just disinform. It anesthetizes. It makes people intellectually comatose.

Now there are new tools for brain disablement, and they work even better than television. Of course, it's not the tools so much as the way people abuse them. The typical user goes around in the fog of an iComa.

For many people, the cell phone or smart phone is almost a body part. It should be just a tool. I don't carry one anymore. Zero minutes, month after month. You should try it. Is there any real reason someone has to reach you instantly or hear back within the next few minutes? In my own case, I am just not that critical of an element in other people's lives. If they can't reach me, life goes on.

What about sleeping next to a cell phone? This is a really bad practice. In the first place, you need your sleep. You do not need to be interrupted, unless you are on call as a first responder. Or maybe you have a very ill relative and are on call for that reason. You get the idea. If it's not critical you be reached immediately, then your sleep should not be interrupted by the phone.

If you work for a boss who insists on your being immediately available by phone even though there's no practical reason for that, you'll need to solve that problem. I had such a boss, and I made sure to wake him up when I got those unnecessary calls. And I'd have at least three subordinates (working the late shift) call him also.

He changed the policy, after realizing how it drops brainpower by a few orders of magnitude. But at first, he told me there was no reason to call him. I told him the same poor logic for calling me applies to him, and if he didn't like being sleep deprived then to drop the whole insane, inhumane, counterproductive policy. And if he kept it up, I'd wake up his boss every time I got a call in the middle of the night. He got my drift. Maybe I should have been more direct and told him how I really felt?

Another bad thing about sleeping next to a cell phone is it gives off radiation. Not much, but why subject yourself to 8 unnecessary hours of exposure night after night? And the idea that your sleep is something you do only if someone else doesn't ring your phone accidentally or on purpose can put your mind in a state of sleep resistance.

Get rid of sleep interrupters. Ban them from your bedroom. Make the room as dark as possible, and go to bed on time so you don't rely on an alarm clock. Waking up to an alarm just so you can be brain-impaired all day is not a good practice. Especially if you really need your job or you are averse to making a fatal driving error on the way there.

But back to the technology thing. Do you feel compelled to check messages frequently? Even when you are doing something else? If so, something is wrong. If you are having dinner with another person, enjoy the conversation and the meal. Check your messages later. In my own case, I check voice mail maybe once a month. It hasn't hurt me to do that. I don't stop what I'm doing to check e-mail, and I don't have e-mail automatically delivered. Rather than let e-mail interrupt me, I control when it can have my attention.

What about Facebook? Do you update your page often? The last time I updated my Facebook page was never. I don't have one. What's the point in putting all that information up? If you do use Facebook, stop and think about how it has really benefitted you. Probably, you won't come up with anything. But that's very different from what would happen if you stopped to think about what you could have been doing if you hadn't spent the time on Facebook. Twitter, same thing.

Not to mention the security issues with posting personal information and your picture(s) for anyone to see (even if you put a "friends only" limit, it can be accessed by non-friends).

Is it smart to divert your limited resources, such as brainpower, to meaningless activities just because you have a gadget announcing you have mail or whatever? No. But it is smart to focus on what you're doing, so that you both enjoy it and do it well.

You may find that, in your social circle, there's peer pressure to engage in the zombie lifestyle. Resist. Set an example for the others, and if they try to pull you down then you need new friends and acquaintances. Life is too short to go through it with your mind enslaved by a pocket gizmo or other "brain off" bit of silicon and plastic.

Unfortunately, we do not have an "immediate improvement" proposition in regard to the major drain on our finances. So I will still provide those "mice" level tips from time to time. Not in this issue, though.

The commentary that follows is for our American readers, but may have some carryover for our other readers.

Who spends your money?

Our current Spender in Chief (SIC) has been bragging about the drop in the "unemployment rate" (new claims for unemployment insurance), claiming, "I deserve a second term." He'll get that term, but based on this metric he deserves to serve his second term the same way Governor Ryan is serving his (in prison).

The inconvenient truth that the SIC fails to mention is the current rate is still a whole percentage point above where it was when he took office. So he deserves as second term as POTUS (rather than in prison) for making it worse after three years of his "solutions?"

But wait. This story doesn't end there. After the Porkulus hit, this rate went up three percentage points. This should not be surprising, given the fact that the Porkulus was a massive job elimination bill. By robbing productive enterprises of capital and sending the booty to his employers, our SIC "leader" did nicely for himself. But at a huge and tragic cost to millions of Americans.

After the economy absorbed much of the initial gut-punching delivered by the Porkulus, the unemployment rate came back down to its present level. That's not an improvement, it's still worse than when the SIC SOB (Spender In Chief, Spender Of Booty) started.

The real metric by which to evaluate the economic effectiveness of the POTUS is the increase or decrease in federal debt, because that's what (respectively) depresses or invigorates the economy. Obama set the all-time record for the  debt generation, and he did it in less than three years. We can't take him seriously when he claims this means he deserves another four years. But then, it's the party bosses who decide who is POTUS and who is not.

On top of this grand larceny, we sit here powerless while the Federal Reserve merrily (and illegally) counterfeits tens of trillions of dollars annually. That is a form of taxation (or theft, if you happen to differentiate between taxation and theft).

You could clip coupons until the cows come home, but you can't possibly keep up with the looting and plundering done by the band of criminals running the federal government and the Federal Reserve. Your single largest cost, by far, is the larceny inflicted on you by these criminals. Reducing that cost is the single best way to improve the financial health of Americans in general, and probably you specifically.

What can you do to improve the financial picture of you and your fellow Americans? Well, certainly surrendering your vote to the party bosses (who control both the Democrats and the Republicans) does not help you.

In fact, doing that just lets them know you are either clueless or apathetic about the crime. So your first line of defense is to vote anything but D/R. Your second line of defense is to put pressure on your misrepresentatives in CONgress to start eliminating harmful, useless agencies like the BATFE and the IRS. Nor do we need to own half the world's aircraft carriers or send troops to Islamic countries that don't want our troops inside their borders.

***

Repeating from the previous issue:

To help end the insanity, you can vote as a red pill person. That is, vote for anyone other than the D-R "candidates." Consider voting for the one Presidential candidate who believes this should be a nation of law, not a nation run by the whims of criminals. You'll probably have to write him in, but it takes only a few seconds to do that.

Even the state-run newspapers regularly publish accounts of armed citizens stopping a crime. Usually without even firing a shot. This really annoys the advocates of lawlessness and criminal protection. They would much rather see rapes, murders, and burglaries happen instead of being prevented. We know not what possesses them to hold such a crazy idea, but hold it they do.

Do you really want to help these people implement their insane vision of human life as meaningless? Or do you want to protect your home and end the "string of victims" thing that happens when the criminal keeps moving on from one unarmed victim to the next?

Exposing your children to free-reigning criminals isn't the solution to misperceived "gun danger." Check out Eddy Eagle at www.nra.org.

Protect your kids and everyone else but the criminal, by keeping your firearms ready and easily accessible. Keep a flashlight, safety glasses, and hearing protection with each home defense tool also.

Don't worry about local laws that favor criminals. These are unjust laws. If you save your family, any fallout from breaking those unjust (and illegal) laws is worth it.

Consider the case of an Illinois man convicted of murder after saving his young daughter from certain death. The man was bleeding from several knife wounds to the chest, but still managed to kill the kidnapper as the creep was halfway out a window of the apartment with the man's daughter. There was no firearm involved, but the NRA is providing legal assistance to this man because the NRA stands for the Bill of Rights, not just one of the rights in that Bill.

In the March issue, a reader wrote in "correcting" her, but he has his facts wrong. Unfortunately, his misconception is the rule and not the exception.

Here’s an excerpt from what he wrote: …in regard to the claim that cardio will make you fat, when’s the last time you saw…a marathoner…with a spare tire…?"

He misunderstood where Michalik was coming from, and that has to do with his definition of "fat."

Long distance runners are, in fact, fatter than sprinters. If you measure the body fat as a percent of lean mass, that’s the way it is. Having a spare tire or not is irrelevant.

If you want to have a lean body, you will get there (or more easily maintain) by doing short, intense workouts than by doing protracted low-intensity exercise.

Age 50.

However, he seemed completely unaware of the fact that the calorie burn from a cardio session ends right along with the cardio session. The calorie burn from a weight workout (done properly), however, goes on for days. And the weight session helps shift the calorie burn to prefer fat as fuel, which is another reason weight training athletes get ripped.

This "controversy" of cardio versus intense training is no debate at all. Intense training wins so compellingly as to render it no contest. The proof is in the bodies of those who are ripped versus those who are not. To paraphrase the dissenter, when is the last time you ever saw a ripped long distance runner? Answer: You didn’t.

Cardio can make a great adjunct to a weight-training program, but it can never replace it when your goal is to lose fat as fast as possible and keep it off.

At www.supplecity.com, you'll find plenty of informative, authoritative articles on maintaining a lean, strong physique. It has nothing to do with long workouts or impossible to maintain diets. In fact:

• The best workouts are short and intense.
• A good diet contains far more flavors and satisfaction than the typical American diet.