Mindconnection eNL, 2015-06-21

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The illegal and hugely damaging mislegislation known as the Unaffordable Care Act (aka, Obummercare) is such a boondoggle that the constant and increasing outrage over it is getting results. Since our previous edition, I've received a large number of e-mails from various groups and legislators talking about this or that solution to the problem. Kansas Senator Jerry Moran appears to be making solid progress on repeal.

Item 2

A petition drive stopped Anaheim’s community cat feeding ban. The ban made it illegal for anyone to feed a stray cat. This is good news, because it is a case of citizen activists overturning idiotic and harmful laws.

Feeding a stray cat quite often leads to adoption. First you feed the cat, then it decides to live at your place, then you take it to the vet for shots and sterilization, then you just go ahead and adopt the cute little bugger.

The idiots behind the ban were apparently unaware of all this. They "thought" the way to stop the feral cat (or, more likely, homeless cat) problem was to try to starve the cats to death. They seem oblivious to the fact that cats hunt and most can feed themselves. So this would do nothing but turn these cats to plundering the local bird, reptile, and small mammal population. The older or less capable ones would eventually starve under this scenario, making it cruel.

The proven strategy for reducing the homeless cat population is two-step:

1. Capture, sterilize, release. The cats who've undergone this get one ear clipped.
2. Encourage interaction with humans, typically via food offerings, so the cats can find an adoptive home.

Item 3

Augmented reality goggles could help the blind navigate. Full story here:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/538491/augmented-reality-glasses-could-help-legally-blind-navigate

Personally, I don't agree with a certain public speaker (who is blind) that blind people are not handicapped but those of us who are "light dependent" are. Being without one of your "five senses" is a handicap. Yes, blind people can and do adapt. But the fact remains they cannot see, and that poses limitations they would not otherwise have.

Your eyesight is a precious gift. Be sure to wear proper eye protection when using power tools, hammering a nail, or doing anything else that might send a projectile into one of these delicate organs. That includes wearing industrial grade safety glasses while mowing. These glasses are inexpensive and available online and at any hardware store. Your eyesight is priceless and you get a pair of eyes only once.

Item 4

A new graphene coating system could improve home heating efficiency by 70%. That's really good news for people who set their thermostat to 55 DegrF during the winter. Those who choose this system for their next heating unit replacement can set their thermostat to a luxurious 60 DegrF and not feel guilty. Full story here:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/green-tech/conservation/graphene-heating-system-dramatically-reduces-home-energy-costs

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Here's an item that illustrates the "brain off mode" way of "thinking" that the criminal safety advocates use. Notice how it answers some of their most often (mis)used nonsensical "arguments" with common sense.

Today I swung my front door wide open and placed my Remington 30.06 right in the doorway.  I left 6 cartridges beside it, then left it alone and went about my business.

While I was gone, the mailman delivered my mail, the neighbor boy across the street mowed the yard, a girl walked her dog down the street, and quite a few cars stopped at the stop sign near the front of my house.

After about an hour, I checked on the gun.  It was still sitting there, right where I had left it.  It hadn't moved itself outside.  It certainly hadn't killed anyone, even with the numerous opportunities it had presented to do so.

In fact, it hadn't even loaded itself.  Well you can imagine my surprise, with all the hype by the Left and the Media about how dangerous guns are and how they kill people.  Either the media is wrong or I'm in possession of the laziest gun in the world.

The United States is 3rd in murders throughout the world.  But if you take out just 4 cities: Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, and New Orleans (all criminal protection zones), the United States is 4th from the bottom, in the entire world, for murders.

These 4 cities also have the toughest "Gun Control" (criminal protection) laws in the U.S.  All 4 of these cities are controlled by Democrats.  It would be absurd to draw any conclusions from this data, right?

Well, I'm off to check on my spoons.  I hear they're making people fat.

The first part of this item illustrates the non-sequitor (B does not follow from A, therefore A does not validate B). The second illustrates where the obvious connections between dots are simply ignored. I'm not sure what the name for this is, perhaps "anti-sequitor." When B necessarily follows A, yet B is not acknowledged.

The problem goes well beyond the lunacy of criminal safety laws. Over this next week, try to be especially vigilant for non-sequitors and anti-sequitors. But rather than see how many you can count, see which sources spew these at you. Those are sources to avoid, if not ignore altogether.

Thousands of rich Americans like Campbell Soup heir John Dorrance III and former Star-Kist Foods Chairman Joseph Bogdanovich had simply had enough. Of what, we'll explain in a moment.

First, CONgress imposed a ten-year tax on expatriated Americans. Next, these idiots passed a law forbidding "tax-motivated" expats from ever visiting the U.S. again. Has it worked?

Rhetorical question, I guess. Has ANYTHING done by Congress worked? Asking if something Congress did actually worked is like asking if having sex prevents babies.

And we do have the data on this particular failure. Since Forbes first wrote about the expatriate phenomenon (28 FEB 1994), the problem has gotten worse. A lot worse.

A total of 4,415 people have turned in their citizenship or green cards over the past five years, more than half of them after the feds cracked down. Remember, these are wealthy people who are behind engines of wealth. They create jobs. Lots of jobs. Many other expats deliberately lose citizenship without formally renouncing, believing that way they evade the ban on visiting.

How does that compare to earlier? In the first quarter of 1999, 128 people bailed. Among them were J. Paul Getty's grandson Tara Getty, 31; Jacob Stolt-Nielsen, 36, son of shipping magnate Jacob Stolt-Nielsen Jr.; and Joseph J. Bogdanovich Jr., son of the Star-Kist mogul.

Yeah, a lot worse. Way to go, CONgress.

Because of CONgressional ineptitude, there's now a formally recognized "brain drain" combined with a formally recognized "capital flight." This has a detrimental effect on the economy as a whole, and thereby on most individuals in the USA economy.

If you understand the cause, you know the solution. And extensive interviews with expats have clearly revealed what the cause is.

The solution?

Disband the Institute of Reprobates and Sociopaths.

The number one reason people expatriate is to get away from the abuse, hassle, and terrorist attacks (I do not dramatize, here) inflicted upon them by this rogue agency. It's an agency overwhelmingly populated by misfits, retards, sociopaths, psychopaths, and the sort of folks who grew up torturing small animals.

And it is totally out of control, with no oversight and no accountability. Institute goons literally get away with murder, time and time again. Murder as in "making someone dead." I am not embellishing, here (look up the name "Kevin DeLotty," for starters"). Anyone familiar with the Hoyt Fiasco or the Amcor Atrocity knows the names of a few "prematurely deceased." These people were silenced as part of Kevin Brown's crime-spree cover-up.

Do not confuse this aversion to the Institute with an aversion to taxes. Not a single expat has fled due to taxes, contrary to the spin put on this by the liars, cheats, and scoundrels in CONgress. Nearly all of these people fled as their only way of relief from the gross misconduct of individual Institute reprobates.

Abolishing this useless and harmful agency will vastly boost the economy (for several reasons), thereby increasing federal revenue even with the idiotic 1040 system eliminated (especially with the idiotic 1040 system eliminated).

The Institute of Reprobates and Sociopaths is the most hated and feared agency we have. And it's well past the time that we should be able to say that we no longer have it.

• 2000 Discovery Health Channel Study of Fears and Phobias shows that Americans fear the Institute more than they fear God!
• 1999 survey of most despotic government agencies of all time (no longer available online) shows that Americans rank the Institute number 2, close behind Hitler's Gestapo and far ahead of the former Soviet KGB.
•  The USA is the only nation in the world where citizens risk losing all of their assets, due to a signature of a single non-elected bureaucrat, regardless of where those assets were acquired or may be domiciled. Worse yet, in a court challenge, the burden of proof is on the citizen.
• You do not have to have done anything wrong to become a target. Most victims are entirely innocent; they are targeted pretty much the same way serial killers target their victims.

That Congress has not yet disbanded this band of reprobates is contemptible in the extreme. Please help bring about the restoration of law and order by pushing for the disbanding of this most hated and feared agency. Write to those Neanderthals in CONgress and insist they do something concrete to help bring about the end of the government's most hated and harmful agency.

Not reform, which never works, but an end. Period.

Make your misrepresentative in Congress aware of this illegal activity, before the IRS comes for you. They don't need more than thin excuse, even if you've done nothing wrong.

Recently, a woman asked me about how many reps to do per set. She had been doing her own thing, and then hired a trainer. The trainer had her doing 15 reps per set.

After a few weeks, she noticed a loss of strength. She also lost definition. She brought this to the trainer's attention, and the trainer's solution was "you need to do more cardio."

The trainer insisted that, because her methods had helped hundreds of people get in shape, those methods were correct. She had the proverbial proof in the pudding.

Yes, if you take out of shape people and put them through low-intensity, high volume workouts they will see dramatic improvement. And they are not mentally or physically ready for intense workouts. Giving them a highly structured reps/sets structure allows them to make progress even if they aren't in tune with what their bodies are doing (out of shape people almost never are).

But this method does not produce the adaptive response that stimulates new muscle growth. It burns calories and very moderately stimulates atrophied muscles into recovery.

She described her typical overhead shoulder press as follows:

"I don't care how fast I raise the dumbbells. I just get the weights up there. Then I bend my elbows a bit and hold for the count of five. I drop it a little, and do that again. Then I lower the weight very slowly to about here (she indicated a place a few inches above her shoulders), hold for five, and push back up. But I never try to do a predetermined number of reps. I might do two in that set. Maybe the next set, I will do two. I might have a couple one-rep sets, because I really got that burn on the way down and just could not push back up with out a rest."

This is very close to how I do the overhead shoulder press. I told her that and suggested she go back to it.

Let's review some common rep/set schemes.

• 3 sets of 8 reps. This is the classic recommendation for new gym members. It gets them quickly from one exercise station to the next, and produces the moderate results that most folks are quite satisfied with. It's fine for someone who doesn't care about having six-pack abs or a powerful physique. You will not find any professional athlete using this system.
• 10 sets of 4 reps, and similar schemes. Doing more sets with fewer reps is generally in the right direction. But the risk is you get fixated on counting reps instead of focusing on training the muscle(s) you are presumably wanting to train with that exercise.
• Cascading reps. The idea is you start with some number (e.g., 10) of reps and do one less rep with each subsequent set. The theory is your muscles lose exactly enough strength with each set that this math works out perfectly.
• Sets of 15, 20, or more reps--with "heavy" weights. The theory behind this is more reps = more calories burned and more blood pumped. But if done as the primary training mode, it totally negates the adaptive response because it replaces intensity with endurance.
• Sets of 15, 20, or more reps--with moderate weights. Defenders will point to some bodybuilder doing this backstage of the Mr. Olympia contest and say, "Look at how Jay Cutler (or whoever) works out! That guy is huge!). Yes, but he does not work out this way. He may use high reps for warm-ups or for finishing movements, but not for the core training. Find a video of these guys training and you see a lot of 1, 2, or 3 rep sets.
• Sets of 15, 20, or more reps--with light weights. The theory behind this is less weight and higher reps gets you "toned" and burns fat, while lower reps and heavier weights makes you too muscular. This theory totally ignores the vast body of evidence. The idea of "toned" came from somewhere in stupid-land. Either you stimulate your muscles to grow, or you don't. You can't stimulate them to "get toned."

A big problem with reps is the way people typically do the exercise is they rest at the extreme end of motion each way. The muscle is under tension only in the middle. Use three different exercises or positions to work the three ranges of motion (full extension, mid-range, and full contraction); this allows you to keep the muscle under tension for the whole set.

What you're really trying to do is break down muscle cells until that muscle can't move the weight anymore without some rest. A rep is really a way to perform the negative portion of the movement; each repetition (thus, "rep") in a set should be there really because you ran out of negative portion and had to raise the weight to get more.

That's why you'll see Ronnie Coleman do 2 or 3 reps of flyes and then have to rest. But look at how he does them!

It's not about doing reps to the point of failure; it's about forcing that muscle to initiate the adaptive response due to the stresses put on it. If you relax the muscle twice with each rep, you're reducing the stresses considerably and thus also reducing the adaptive response.

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

It cost the soft drink industry $100 million a year for thefts committed involving vending  machines.

Considering the billions of damage a year this industry does to the environment and the economy, not to mention the massive cost in human misery for the osteoporosis, brain damage, diabetes, and esophageal cancer caused by their products this seems like a small price to pay. In a sane society, the assets of these companies whould be seized and their operations shut down.

The trouble with bucket seats is that . . .

. . . not everybody has the same size bucket.