Mindconnection eNL, 2016-01-10

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Item 1. It would be nice to report that Barry Soetoro has been arrested and sent to the prison in Guantanamo as an enemy combatant, but sadly we do not have effective law enforcement in the USA. However, there are signs that he will voluntarily step down as (illegal) dictator in January of 2017. So hang in there with that pleasant thought!

Item 2. Moving on from potential news about a totally useless criminal, here is some actual news having to do with a useful, productive human being. Specifically, Peidong Yang. He's a nanomaterials chemist. What he's come up with is huge, and is good news in the extreme.

Read the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/demo/544586/the-ideal-fuel

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Thanks for all the positive feedback on the coverage of dealing with libtards and other brain-drainers. I have more information on that for an upcoming issue, but first let's talk about the other side of the coin.

We all know that libtards aren't merely uninformed. They are disinformed. Being disinformed and unable to correctly process even the disinformation is very important to libtards. It's the key to their staying libtarded. You have to understand that they work at being stupid, it doesn't just happen.

But what about intelligent people? How can you be more informed?

One way people go beyond books, documentaries, and formal classes is they simply ask an expert. This is good as far as it goes, but what about asking a non-expert? Something many people don't realize is someone doesn't have to be an expert or an authority to teach you about a subject.

Even if you are an expert on it, you may learn more from someone who is not an expert on it (this, in fact, is one way experts learn about subjects). For example, someone researching the effects of poverty in Appalachia may interview many people in Appalachia and learn quite a bit even though not one of those people is an expert in economics or related areas.

There are many ways to learn about a subject from non-experts. For example, suppose you tried to grow bell peppers last year and they failed. Do you really need to locate a bell pepper expert to solve this problem? No. Your neighbor three doors down had a bountiful crop of these. He's never read a book or taken a class on growing bell peppers. He doesn't have an agricultural degree. He has no relevant credentials whatsoever. He would never get invited to speak at a symposium of bell pepper experts.

But he does have experience. He's had success. Maybe he does not even know why. So you go and talk to him and ask him how he grows those peppers. It turns out that he does three things differently from how you do things. Based on that conversation, you've now learned what to do so your bell peppers will grow.

How many different ways can this play out?

Maybe you want to start a part-time home business, primarily so you can get a home office deduction for tax purposes. Do you need to consult with a tax expert? No. Do  you need to consult with somebody who has formal business credentials? No.

Your cousin Bob runs a small business from his home. Bob buys craft items by the case, ships them to Amazon, and lets Amazon handle his sales. Bob has no business experience other than this and a failed MLM scheme he tried once. This model works, and it fits into his schedule. From your conversation with Bob, who is not a business expert, you've come up with an idea for a business of your own. You have no interest in crafts, but you are really into motorcycle parts. Great. Find a distributor and launch your business.

Or let's go to less practical concerns. Libtards, for example, often pride themselves on being totally ignorant about history, except when they wish to adopt some alternate universe version of it. Let's say you aren't a history buff yet you anticipate discussions with this as the topic. You want to avoid being possibly mistaken for a libtard when discussions turn to topics of history. But you don't have time to take a university course and you don't know any professors. What can you do?

Well, you probably have a friend or three who is a history buff. Ask them to pick a period of history and talk about it. What you'll glean from this conversation is what an amateur finds to be important. That's going to be different from what an academic finds important and it will probably be useful to you. Once you know which periods are important, go to your public library's audio book offerings and find the appropriate University Lecture Series and start listening to those. Or read a good book or three about an era, making sure to check the citations in back before buying or borrowing the book.

Another thing you can do is identify museums with the relevant artifacts. Seeing handwritten letters behind glass is about as good as it gets. Seeing bullet holes in government buildings in Columbia, SC is also very helpful when learning about the War Between the States. Get out there and see things.

You don't have to ask an expert. Often, you can simply ask someone who shares an interest and come out with a big upgrade to your knowledge level. The risk of this approach is you might latch on to a libtard and come out worse off than if you knew nothing at all. You'll just have to be alert to the signs of libtardation and exercise some discretion.

It's also worth noting that "experts" aren't infallible and can give you wrong info. This typically happens when they appear to have expertise about a subject but in fact do not.

A case in point is my sister said she stopped using baking soda to brush her teeth because her dentist said it will wear down the enamel. Hey, he knows teeth so he must be right. Right? Nope. Baking soda is a 2 on the hardness scale, tooth enamel is a 5. There is no way baking soda can abrade your teeth. The crystalline structure of the soda will break apart when rubbed onto tooth enamel.

When I told her this, she seemed puzzled. How can an expert be wrong? She suggested maybe it's a chemical thing. Nope. Baking soda is a base, it neutralizes the acid on your teeth and thus protects them from breakdown. By the way, those metal instruments the dentist uses are a 4 on the hardness scale. But the "whiteners" put into many toothpastes are at 6 or even 7, and those will certainly abrade your teeth.

It's not that you can't trust experts. You just need to make sure they are experts in the subject they are talking about. Anyone working in materials knows the hardness scale. My dad was a tool designer, and knew this scale intimately. He would have been a good expert to ask about baking soda, while the dentist certainly had no knowledge in this area.

When you read state-run propaganda outlet pieces spewing lies to the effect we are a low-tax country, how do they come up with this drivel? Well, they ignore nearly all of the several hundred different taxes we pay (in 2000, there were 128 different taxes built into the price of a single loaf of bread and more have been added since then) and focus only on the out of pocket costs directly attributable to the 1040 tax. They also ignore the huge compliance costs of the 1040 tax, which all by themselves exceed the total taxation endured by citizens in most other countries.

Most of the federal taxes inflicted upon us are illegal or their proceeds are used for criminal endeavors (that is, functions of the federal government not permitted by its enumerated powers). For state, county, and municipal taxes, the criminality is less of an issue but wasteful stupidity in spending those dollars is a big problem.

In the preceding paragraph lies one key to lowering our ghastly taxes. That is to actively solicit our misrepresentatives to cut specific spending. Don't ask them to "lower spending" because that concept is not one they can understand (much less embrace). We must tackle the stealing and the waste an issue at a time.

The National Taxpayer's Union ( http://www.ntu.org ) is an excellent resource in this regard. Maybe you've been taxed into such financial despair you can't afford to send them $25. If so, at least visit their site and get on their e-mail list so you can know which issues to object to via a message to your senators and House misrepresentative.

Many people believe if we keep this effort up, we can tame the beast. I don't think so, but we have a good track record of stopping individual abuses. The NTU has saved every household in the country considerable money.

To tame the beast of runaway spending (and thus taxation), we have to do two things:

1. Vote with our pocketbooks. Boycott companies that benefit from the stealing, because those are the ones with members of CONgress on their payroll. If you can't totally boycott (for example, it's pretty hard for most folks to not buy gasoline) then find ways to reduce what you do spend with those companies. That land-barge SUV rolling down the highway? The driver is a tax-increase enabler.
2. At the polls, vote in the affirmative for law and order. The fake elections are not about picking someone for office. They are a poll to see how many people are being fooled by the D versus R game. Rather than throw your vote away (protesting D by voting R or vice versa) and thus show you approve of crime, vote Libertarian so your vote actually does something.

Debt matters

I want to reiterate what I've said in previous editions about the national debt (USA). It's not the case (as it usually is with personal debt) that the govt went into debt buying things of value and thus there's collateral. The spending is "financed" through what are called "debt instruments". These are not equity instruments; there is no value underlying them.

In itself, a debt instrument isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you borrow a cup of flour from your neighbor, your promise to pay it back is a debt instrument of sorts. But suppose you've made this same promise for other things you've borrowed and have not given back: his refrigerator, jewelry, car, tools, living room couch, and lawn mower. The magnitude of this unbacked, unpaid debt makes it fraud.

So (what poses as) the federal government has this massive debt that, in itself is fraud. On top of that, it pays some of this debt off with "money" that the (non)Federal (non)Reserve simply creates out of thin air. That's another fraud; in fact, if you do this you are committing a felony called counterfeiting and could go to prison for life for doing it. That's because counterfeiting has a profoundly negative effect on a nation's economy if done to any scale.

The main job of the Secret Service is to stop counterfeiting, and that was its original charter. Yet, the SS has never indicted anyone at the nFnR for counterfeiting even though over recent five-year period it counterfeited $49 trillion (not just billion) that it gave to several large banks.

The SS won't stop counterfeiting at the nFnR, because one of its main customers of funny money is the Federal Government. The Federal Government "services" much of this illicit debt with that funny money, thereby reducing the value of every dollar you hold in a mutual fund, bank account, or wallet. The federal debt drives a big portion of the counterfeiting. So this, among other reasons, gives us a huge incentive to reduce illicit federal spending and thus the burgeoning federal debt.

A self-styled "bodybuilding expert" sends out his missives and I'm on his list. Some of what he writes is astoundingly bad. So my first tip for you is to avoid thinking you've stumbled onto the "magic bullet" just because what someone wrote says to do something that you haven't tried before.

In a recent letter, he wrote about "the secrets to improving your bench press." It was clear that he just sat down and dreamed up stuff, so that he'd come up with presumably original material. That "make it up to be original" is an effect that Google has created by its badly flawed algorithm.

If Lee Haney and Arnold Schwarzenegger give exactly the same advice, such as "You need to do your squats but with correct form" that will count as spam (duplicate content). But if some idiot writes some drivel such as, "Always spray garlic on your squat rack before squatting" that will show up head of the good advice in the Google results. That's why people write idiotic crap; Google rewards them for it.

One bit of advice our ersatz expert gave was to keep adding weight. He correctly pointed out that this is easy to do with the bench press, because you can just add 2.5lb plates on each side.

What he didn't point out was the number one reason people don't progress in their bench press is they are using too much weight. To lift this excess weight, they rotate their shoulders forward. So now instead of working the pecs properly, they are putting odd-angle stress on their shoulder joints and overworking their front deltoids.

Here are some tips to improve your bench press:

• Eliminate wheat, corn, and soy from your diet. Really. This stuff contains endocrine disrupters that lower your testosterone. You need T to increase muscle strength and size.
• Same as previous, but applies to products made from these. Such as the notoriously T-lowering corn syrup.
• Keep your shoulders back during the exercise. Think in terms of pinning them to the bench or trying to touch them together. Have someone help you until you really get the feeling of "shoulders way, way, way back" and can do it upon demand.
• Check your pride at the door. It's not about how much you can lift, but about how much you can load those pecs. Less weight used properly loads more than more weight used improperly. Don't worry about what the  insecure losers around you are doing. Focus on YOUR training. After a few months of that attitude, your chest will prove you know what you're doing. People will simply look at you and know.
• If you have not previously trained with shoulders way, way, way back then decrease your bench press weight by 60% to 70%. Yes, that much. Or use just the bar, even better. Work on your form. You will get more pec training with 45lbs done correctly than with 200lbs done incorrectly. Slowly add weight (increase every other week or so), but go back one step if your form suffers.
• Slow on the way down. Try a few reps that take 15 seconds, feel the burn.
• Do not train any other body part on chest day, unless it's triceps or biceps. You will work those two muscle groups indirectly, so pairing one or the other with chest is fine. But pick one, not both. For example, pair chest with triceps and then work biceps on your back day; this allows you to work a front and back muscle group each time.
• Don't overdo it. I like to do three to four reps per set, and five or six sets. To really develop the pecs and to open your chest wider, you will need to do flyes.

Please note that the typical bench press technique, being shoulders forward, contracts the chest. Pull your shoulders back and stretch your chest open as far as you can. When you then bench, the weight will be like traction in the sense it's going to exert force that expands your chest.

Sometimes when I tell people this they say it's not possible. Well, my chest has grown quite a bit in my adulthood so I know from my own experience that this does work. It is also worth noting that Arnold Schwarzenegger was saying the same thing back in the 1970s and proving it with the  measuring tape. Not that his pecs were growing, but that his chest wall was expanding from his training. Good bench and flye technique does have that effect. Poor bench and flye technique has the opposite effect.

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

You can lead some people to water, but you can't make them think.