Mindconnection eNL, 2019-06-23

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Item 1. The federal government's Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that during April the disposable personal income of Americans increased by $69.3 billion.

Item 2. Lionfish are native to the Indo-Pacific Ocean, and were introduced to the waters off the US several decades ago. They have since spread through the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Without a natural predator, they’ve thrived, wreaking havoc in native ecosystems. Now there's a submersible robot, called Guardian LF1 that hunts, stuns, and captures lionfish. Read the full story here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613623/meet-the-robot-submarine-that-acts-as-a-lionfish-terminator

A version that hunts, stuns, and captures IRS predators is allegedly in the works. Just kidding, but that would be awesome news!

Item 3. On 05JUN, YouTube announced new rules around hate speech on Wednesday prohibiting videos which promote Nazi ideology or deny the existence of the Holocaust. For anyone who has seen the live footage taken at Eisenhower's insistence, this is good news (also good news for the survivors, the soldiers who returned from liberating those camps, and the families of those whose names were recorded in the Nazi records as exterminated).

Some people see this as a limit on free speech, but it's not. It's a limit on conning other people into denying the mountain of evidence that these horrors were perpetrated. To suggest it was a hoax is absurd; where did those piles of emaciated corpses come from? Did Ike pay people to starve themselves for a few months so they could go on camera at less than half their normal body weight to participate in a hoax? We already won the war, what would have been the point? Start asking questions like these, and the deniers look ridiculous. The problem is most people don't ask questions like these, so are easily duped by deniers. Thus, the ban.

Item 4. There's some relief for the millions of victims of the illegal Unaffordable Care Act. on 14JUN, President Trump announced the release of new rules that allow HRA funds to be used to pay for individual insurance premiums on the exchanges or off the exchanges to satisfy the employer mandate. Read the full story, here: https://nsba.biz/trump-announces-new-hra-rules/

Item 5. A laser treatment destroys cancer cells in the blood. Read the full story here:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/diagnostics/laser-destroys-cancer-cells-circulating-in-the-blood

Of course, it would be far more efficient to aim lasers at Monsanto and force them to quit pumping carcinogens into our food supply. Same thing for the tobacco industry, the makers of hydrogenated oil, and some other cancer creators that profit from human suffering.

Item 6. Robotics keep getting better. Watch this video:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/video-friday-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-dexterous-robot-hands

Item 7. The world's most hated terrorist organization may soon get another limit on their power to abuse and destroy. Read the full story here:
https://responseaction.com/Article/win-small-businesses-over-irs

Item 8. The world's most hated terrorist organization (of course, I mean the IRS) is facing a big attrition, something like 1/3 of its gang member count (I almost said workforce) in the next four years due to retirements and expected quits. Morale is at an all-time low, they are having great difficulty hiring people, and most everybody there is disengaged. Blowback from the Hoyt Fiasco brought IRS major grief, and so did retribution for their attacks on TEA Party people.

The agency has acted with total disregard for ethics, morals, rule of law, civil rights, and human decency under the theory they cannot be stopped. And now the agency this crime syndicate is falling apart. That is good news by any measure.

Let's all do our part to drive a stake into the heart of this evil monster. Write to your Congressional representative today, urging that person to reject any IRS-related funding proposals. That should further demoralize, destabilize, and defang this beast.

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1. Learn a new language.
2. Join a bridge club.
3. Join a chess club.
4. Learn a new skill or trade.
5. Periodically review how you organize your life. Pick a different aspect each week and spend time thinking of at least one way to improve. This works those mental muscles!
6. Try cooking methods you haven't tried before, with food you haven't tried cooking before.
7. Learn a brain-intensive sport, such as climbing (spatial intelligence, mechanical physics, geometry, and problem solving are all used extensively).
8. Do the puzzles that are in magazines and in the bathroom readers such as the one The Dollar Shave Club publishes.
9. Buy a crossword puzzle book, spend 15 minutes a day working those puzzles.
10. Buy a math puzzle book, spend 20 minutes a day working those puzzles.
11. Design, build, and repair things that you use (or could use) around the home or office (you have to learn the relevant trade skills involved).
12. Do your own automotive maintenance and repairs (takes intense learning to master the skills and knowledge).
13. Find a new challenge at work. About 80% of American workers are emotionally and mentally disengaged from their jobs; boredom is one reason. So is the pointlessness of the job. Look for something the company could benefit from and pursue it, essentially designing your own job within the one you now have.
14. Start a business. Run that business (rather than let it run you).
15. Make a habit of reading for 20 minutes each night before bed. If you like fiction, read that (it works the imagination); but be sure to work in some non-fiction to boost your knowledge base.
16. Listen to audio books instead of the same old music when driving or doing whatever you do when listening to music.
17. Train with weights, the old school way. This means no distractions. Your total focus is on feeling what your muscles are doing. This increases body kinesis (a beneficial brain skill) and helps you build focus (another beneficial skill).
18. Spend three years studying a non-commercial martial art (that is, one taught for the love of the art rather than in a big chain franchise school). Kung Fu is considered the brainiest of the martial arts, due to its many complicated moves and other attributes.
19. Make a point of not relying on your smart phone. Use it as an aid to, not substitute for, thinking and knowing.
20. Have a real conversation with someone, at least once a week.

Oven. The oven is the single largest heat source in the typical home.

• Batch baking jobs, back to back. Suppose you want to bake cookies this week. That means you set your oven at 375. You also want to  you want to bake squash and sweet potatoes (475) and an apple pie (425). If you pick a relatively cool morning and have all three items prepped and ready to bake at that time, you eliminate two big heat up and cool down cycles.
• Pick a cool time, relative to the expected temperature. I bake year 'round. I have a great recipe for something I bake for breakfast, in a batch that will last me about 8 days (with freezing and refrigerating keeping things from spoiling). I pick an upcoming day when it will be the coolest of two or three days, and start baking before sunrise.
• Exhaust the baking heat. I use fans to push and pull an airstream through the kitchen, taking the heat outside.
• Check the weather seal on each of your windows. Look closely. Often, you can repair the existing seal using clamps and glue (for example, the seal itself is OK, it just doesn't stick well to the frame and stay in position). But if not, pick up a new seal that is like the old one and install it yourself (if you have the skills, else hire a pro).

Refrigerator. The refrigerator is the biggest energy hog in the typical home, and typically there is huge room for improvement.

• Think before even putting your hand on the refrigerator door handle. What exactly are you going to get from there, and where is it in the refrigerator?  Or if you are going to put something in, where will you put it?
• At the grocery store, mark at least one reusable bag "Refrigerator Items Only". When you get home, you open the refrigerator once instead of several times. I save at least $50 a year doing just this one simple thing. The catch is at the grocery store male cashiers and baggers usually don't get it even if you tell them three times. The women always do.
• Let hot things cool to about 160 DegrF before putting them in the refrigerator. The container should still feel hot to the touch. Don't let things cool to room temperature, as that will mean a bacteria problem.
• When putting hot things in the refrigerator, put them apart from  each other rather than close together.
• If you thaw frozen meat, plan ahead so you can thaw it in the refrigerator. This not only saves energy, it prevents the bacteria problem that is practically guaranteed by thawing on the counter. Same thing goes for beans or other items you freeze.

Dishwasher

• Use it less often, by washing plastic items by hand. You can wash these in cool water; hot water doesn't sterilize your dishes (it helps remove grease, and if you eliminate meat you don't have grease to remove). To disinfect dishes, use vinegar.
• If you have a higher-end unit, use the economy setting. This uses less heat and less water, but takes longer. Use the timer function to have it run at night while you're asleep if you want to unload in the AM, or use the timer to have it run late in the AM (but not in the high-load afternoon) so you can unload it when you get home from work. Or whatever works for your schedule and also keeps it from running during peak load times or when you are cooling the house.
• Don't prewash dishes, washing them is the dishwasher's job. However, there are some things you need to clean off by hand right away. Those are things like eggs (dried egg is a booger to get off), milk (it sours and stinks fast), bean reside (comes off easily while fresh, not so easily when dried). You might want to get the sticky stuff off and then put the items in the dishwasher, or just wash them by hand since you've already started. For most things, you don't even need to rinse. Just scrape off any big particles and load the item in the dishwasher.

Cooking, generally

• Invest in an inductive cook top, and make your omelets and other items outside. I pop popcorn and boil eggs, using mine. I also use my crockpot outside
• Invest in a pressure cooker. This saves time and energy in no small way.
• If you eat meat, eat less of it. Cleaning up after meat preparation and eating takes a lot of hot water.
• Choose raw dishes. These foods are great raw, though most people cook them: eggplant (I like to dice it and add it to veggie mixes), bok choy, green cabbage, kale, spinach, peas, green beans, bell peppers, hot peppers, carrots, mushrooms, and practically any other vegetable that isn't a root vegetable.

Air conditioner

• You don't need to cool your whole house as much as you need to cool the sleeping areas. Keep bedroom doors closed and their registers fully open. Keep bathroom registers barely flowing air (so you will use less hot water when showering), and cut back each non-bedroom a little bit. Don't go nuts with closing registers, else you will simply blow cold air out of the joints in your air distribution system thus wasting it. Or you could burn up your blower.
• Check the filter every week. Pick a day. What day is Check the Air Filter Day? Friday? Fine, check it every Friday. Make an Outlook appointment on your PC or an alert on your smartphone if you must. But keep that filter clean. By clean, I mean look for discoloration rather than a buildup of material. And don't use those cheap fiberglass filters, they don't protect your system. Use a pleated one that has a high MERV rating.
• If a solicitor comes to your door, don't stand there holding the door open while that person stands on your porch. Why not be civilized and invite that person in? If you don't feel safe doing that, go outside and close the door behind you.

Television. Turn it off. Not to save energy, but to save your mind and to save the time that is wasted by watching it.

The smartphone has many uses, but there are some things you absolutely should not use it for. Consider the following:

• Access to any of your checking accounts, credit card accounts, mutual funds, etc. So you lose your phone, and guess what you lose next? Sure, you've got passwords; but phone thieves have password cracking software. Do your online banking from the safety of a device that doesn't leave home.

• Facebook account. Actually, you should not have one of these at all unless your personal security is of no importance to you.

• Details about people in your contacts list. Don't use the phone as a repository. It's a phone. Put no more information about people than is required to call or text them. Ask others to extend the same courtesy to you.

• Details about you. The phone already has a treasure trove of information about you. Make sure it doesn't have your SSN, your mother's maiden name, or other information that can be used to steal your identity and that doesn't serve an essential purpose by being on that phone.

• Archiving of valuable photos. The storage on these phones is easily corrupted. Use the phone to take photos or movies, but synch them to cloud storage or manually transfer them to PC with minimal delay.

• Text messages containing sensitive data. Don't text people how much money you made last year, your SSN, your drivers license number, etc. Those texts can not only be retrieved from your (lost, stolen, or temporarily heisted) phone, they can be intercepted during transmission.

• Text messages containing any NSA "red flag" phrases. Remember, that phone is a tracking device. The last thing you need in your life is to be identified as a "person of interest" and then put under surveillance. If you don't think the NSA or some other agency can't operate your camera as well as track your position via GPS, you are naive.

• (Anti)social media. These platforms invariably produce conflict. If you participate using your phone, you'll get an alert every time an adversary initiates another round of mindless arguing.

• Newsfeeds. While this isn't a security issue per se, these feeds consist of "choose your echo chamber" and they waste your time while feeding you disinformation.

• Alerts you don't need. Generally, you want to disable alerts as much as possible; this has a net positive effect on your effective IQ, typically around 100 IQ points and that is a fact.

It's interesting that we call these devices smartphones but most people who have them use them stupidly. The effect is that the phone uses them instead of the other way around. Be smart about how you use the phone. Consider it a security risk and make conscious effort to reduce that risk. Before installing an app, think carefully about how it might increase your security risk. Convenience is often the candy that entices smartphone "kids" to get into the stranger's van. Put your safety and security first.

Photo taken about one week before 40th High School Class Reunion.

Note that the information provided here will likely conflict with the "fad of the moment" and other unsustainable, unproductive ways of looking at health and fitness.

Article appears below.

See my climbing videos here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCyb67uKOxW_TsG6BVPbBIQ/videos

I've heard people say, "I don't have time to train" or "I wish I had time to train." Have you heard people say these things? Have you heard yourself say these things?

The fact is, you don't have time to not train. Training is part of being healthy, think about how much time you save by not being sick. It's huge. Think about how that gets magnified with age. If you're 75 and still doing squats rather than using a walker, how much time are you saving every day? Huge amounts.

And you do have the time to train. Stop wishing, and make it happen. I have not missed a workout since the summer of 1977, despite working long hours at some jobs (e.g., seven 12 hour days for weeks on end), working full-time while getting my Master's Degree in the evening, and traveling for work. Along with various commitments along the way.

If you treat your training like something you'll do if you have the time when all else is done, you'll never have the time. And all else never gets done. You must put training in its proper place, as something right up there with eating, breathing, and bathing. Whether you prefer to train in the morning, afternoon, or evening has no bearing on this; just block out the time for it.

When I say block out the time, I want you to imagine a day calendar with half hour blocks on it. In the old days, you'd write an activity in that block and reserve that time. You can do the same thing with any calendar app. It's a block, so if you need to move it you can. Suppose you have a training block for 0700, but you have to take your kid to the dentist at 0800. Do you rush through your workout? No. Do you skip it? No, you move it to some other time slot on that day. Normally you do X at 1400 but today that's when you'll do your workout.

But I am oh, so very busy! I don't have any blocks to assign to training! Wrong.

Here are some time-wasters you can reduce or eliminate, freeing up time for training:

• Fighting with other people on (anti)social media. Leave mindless arguing for the weak-minded. It's not your thing!
• Watching television. It's addictive. One hour of TV a day could be used for training. I stopped watching television in 1990. How many years do you think I have effectively added to my life?
• Facebook, Twitter, and other mobile device addictions/time holes: eliminate from your life. You won't miss them.
• Following professional sports. I realize many people enjoy this, but what is the irony in watching overpaid athletes while you atrophy away? It makes no sense!
• Special trips to the store. Organize these trips. Make lists, design an efficient route, and hit every place you can in this one trip this one day instead of making one trip out and back for each of the next six days. The time-savings is enormous.
• Using outdated or inadequate tools. What a difference it makes to have good tools. Someone close to me finally convinced me to stop using little hand pruners and get telescoping professional grade shears. Now I do the same pruning in less than a quarter of the time I used to and there's a lot less fatigue in my hands from pruning.
• Not batching your meals. I am assuming you rarely, if ever, eat out (a big timewaster in most cases). You can batch prep major ingredients and even entire meals, using assembly line methods to save you several hours each month.
• Doing cardio. Many people add half an hour or more to their workout by adding cardio (e.g., treadmill time). This wastes time and can move you backwards against your goals, especially if one of your goals is fat loss (cardio stimulates cortisol, thus making you fatter). Instead of dragging your workout time out so much that you don't have time to work out, do a proper workout (sans cardio).

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

Looking for evidence of Obama's past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims to have been there, but none remembered him. Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983. In 2008, Root said of Obama, "I don't know a single person at Columbia who knew him. And they all know me. I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia, ever."

Obama's photograph does not appear in the school's yearbooks. Even to this day, Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years at Columbia, provide school records, or provide the name of any former classmates or friends while at Columbia. He's such a great orator, would he not be memorable? So why does nobody who was there when he claims to have been there remember him?

He's still not in jail. And that's a shame.

If you aim to be awesome, you might not be awesome but you'll at least be pretty darn impressive. Make the effort, in all you do.